5.17.07

a few of the kinds of nights that i remember the best (and with fondness):

1) the night that is still, in every way in which a thing can ever be still. the air is still, and somehow time itself feels still. the people are, in vast regional majority, also still. and the pressures of daily tasks rest their heads, as only the urgent wanderings of the mind seem to take the wheel and sail for a while. in this stillness, movement itself is something more than it is during the day. because it seems to jump out from that which is immobile, as if it were life being borne out of nothing, it is so unexpected that it changes the essence of its surroundings although they do not visibly change, move, or show any kind of reaction to its motion. the contrast alone between motion and stillness is enough to make stillness change (and somehow appear more still); change being a kind of motion in and of itself.

2) the nights that are fierce with pounding rain. my mother used to put kettles on the floor in calculated places, in the house we lived in for a time. they would catch the rain, and the rain would make some kind of clatter on the roof and an entirely different kind of clatter - one that was somehow more invasive, albeit less audible - would be made as the water fell from the roof into the kettles. these nights were often coated in the kind of black that nature seems to usually reserve for things like coal and tar, due to felled power lines or similar such setbacks. my father, at his house, which was not the same house as that which was filled with kettles, would light candles all around the house, and i would take a hot shower by candlelight and, in doing so, wonder why i didn't do so more often.

3) the nights that did not end until daylight... first experienced as a child during sleepovers when conversation took priority over sleep; later experienced just in order to see if i could stay awake and fight the arms of tiredness. again, such nights were experienced as a teenager, when i roamed cemeteries at night or flung toilet paper rolls over the limbs of trees or drove with friends to random locations or rested on my back in fields with friends or with boys or with only my discman and a few CDs stuffed into a backpack. these were the kinds of nights experienced just in order to isolate them from the concept of day. these were nights that felt like stolen bits of freedom, shared with others or kept secret. these nights were later tainted by parties or booze or awareness of such things as car accidents or troubled friends. but sometimes the feeling tasted on such nights returns full-force and cannot be ignored in any way.

4) nights of a dark, looming, all-encompassing, supernatural breed of fear. nights that had to be shut out with sleep or hot tea or hugging arms. shadows out of which terrifying shapes could be imagined. nights in which things that were still were made to move by will of the mind or by sheer paranoia. nights that made daylight seem warmer than a womb when it graced the land with its presence and rested on her shores.