Ah, the dark night. What a remarkable concept. The most ponderous way of turning off the over used day by limiting one’s viewing. Alleys and doorways get the worse of it. They seem short and endless too uncertain to enter. You go around them, or forget it until daylight calling out, “All clear,” down the corridor rather than walk into the black shadows. Not me, I trust the night. I walk right into the darkness challenging all trash cans and alley cats. The first two steps I strut, the next ten steps I have to, then a short pivot, and I am running showing off my own shadow, eyes waiting wildly for the end to be near.

Oh, the satisfaction of the night. How it lingers in my mind well after I’ve gone into the house. Shutting the door on the last of the day knowing that it is cold outside, dewy on the ground, too misty to be barefoot, but warm and lit wherever you are. What could make the blackened windows seem so beautiful, the curtain’s pattern so dramatic, the kitchen lighting so candlelit besides the night? You’ve seen it, you know it’s out there and if you went out in it, it ruminates. It lingers until you realize you love it so much you have to be it, letting it seep through you, so well, it embodies you as sleep.

How I want to live in the night, rule it, do it, see it and feel it all the time. I find this dull day’s life and love for night more invigorating than drinking two Red Bulls in a row. I dream of night like it’s a hat I wear sending moon beams that glisten on lakes, on hair and in window panes. It’s a crunchy dark fruit immersed in chilly flavors, a perfect drop of chocolate milk sent directly from God’s over flowing cup.

This is the only way for me. The wanting, the waiting, the walking amongst cats, opossum, owls and full trash cans waiting for the trucks at dawn. Running the last few blocks home from sounds I could not decipher, but knew to hear every time I walked there. This is the only life for me. So I began a life of living by night and sleeping days. No more living under a bright sun’s day, being a night moon’s person.

My mother likes to remind me that when I was a child I took credit for inventing the night. I went around showing everyone the drawing I made, mostly black broad back and forth strokes. I told everyone that I drew the night. I invented it. I was the only one who knew how to care for it and I was its mother. I was a simple child even though I was the Mother of the Night, somewhere between luminous and shimmering, that kind of simple.

It didn’t help that I grew up in a place where the sun shined everyday except maybe ten days a year. Everyday I’d wake up and open the curtains to sun blasting through so blazing that it would light up the back of my throat, sending bright beams all the way to the back of my brain. So, depressing. The temperature was seventy-five degrees on the average and rain was almost never an option. We’d pride ourselves on sunny days and hardly knew anything adverse, nothing more than a plain fog. It was a divergent life for me, always ripe for conflict, the classic struggle between butterfly days and tapping toes wanting and waiting to walk in the dark night’s return.