Citizens of The Night
There is no line where the land meets the sky. Our vision is distorted — veiled by the night and conditioned by our constant motion up this winding road. The city below us gleams and glows emitting a magical ochre hue.
We’re too far away for the noise to reach us. We trudge along this road, with this lovely spectacle that comes into view with every turn and just when we’re high enough, that vague line that separated heaven and earth fades away. And the city that held our eyes for so long bleeds into the sky.
The stars don’t seem like stars anymore. Instead, they appear to form a city of their own — eerie but stunning, a city of stars held captive in the night sky, a city that’s infinite, eternal and ever-present. Our bus moves along, a silent spectator with the occasional bump and noise but its passengers, each of them pretending to be asleep are well and truly awake, finding their own escape in tiny little folds of time. When dawn arrives, we’ll be back to the world, to our phones, to work and to all things so habitual and human.
But for now, the silence is comforting, the starry city and the cold breeze keep us here. We’re in the mountains now, but there are little settlements all over. And we’re not alone in this curious world we find ourselves in. We see people every now and then, midnight souls who’ve found their home on the streets, happy youths who’ve taken to singing the night’s stories, the occasional cafe clouded in steam and others setting up shop before the sun rises — citizens of the night.
I’m not sure if sleep eludes them or if they find the beauty of the world at night too tempting to sleep through. They dwell here while we’re just mere visitors — each of us on a pilgrimage of our own. Some of us are escaping our lives just for a day, some are frequent travellers who’ve lived their lives not in a series of stories but of places.
The city of stars fades with time. And the city below begins to absorb the colours of the rising dawn — red, yellow and blue of city paraphernalia begin cropping up.
We pretend to wake from a good night’s sleep. Greetings of a good morning ripple through the bus and the passengers who met as strangers now feel a kinship over this shared experience no one is going to talk about. It’s too vulnerable to admit that for a second we wished that that night would last forever, that fleeting moment when we wanted to call that world our own.
They say the beauty of all things good lies in their mortality, but some things like the starry city or the citizens of the night will always live on, the kind of memory that lingers on after decades, and when the going gets tough, I think this is the memory we’ll all visit — the time we soared the edges of reality with the kindest group of strangers ever.
Thoughtfully yours,
D
Originally published on https://myrandomspecificthoughts.wordpress.com/?p=13199
