Nighttime has never looked so luminous. You're alone, technically,
but there's a city awake and alive and watching the 10 o'clock news and doing their dishes as you put on your shoes and button your coat and step outside.
Your apartment's lobby attendant glances as you exit, wondering where you could possibly be going- its so obvious and natural to you, Walking, of course!, What else? But your roommate told you not to get murdered or kidnapped, jokingly, and you laughed, nowhere near worried.
You've never been worried, not even when you were walking in that snowstorm in the middle of the night
and you couldn't feel your hands or feet. Never worried, never have been.

Sometimes you pass people on the street, sometimes you don't. They're walking, usually in groups, worried to be alone like the worried you never will be.
They're walking quickly, back to their houses or apartment complexes, heading In. You're heading Out, and they wonder where you could possibly be going.

It's cold, cold enough to see the air with each exhale, smoking without smoking, a small visual reminder that you're still breathing.
Good, that's always good to know, to be reassured of. You're the only one crossing the bridge, the one with the perfect view of downtown's skyline
that looks so warm and inviting you almost feel compelled to wave to it, to the skyscrapers shooting upwards,
either giving you the finger or beckoning you into their arms; Depends on their mood, I guess.

The rhythmic chiming of a clock-tower rehearses a tune, spits out a little Do-Re-Mi into the night.
It's distant and eerie, yet audible and seemingly tangible, as though you could casually reach out and grab ahold of the monotone melody
and Go Somewhere.

And snow or rain starts to fall- you can't tell which one it is -lightly,
but its there, small frozen kisses on the cheek, too new and unfamiliar with you to instantly go for the lips.
You look up- Why Not? -and millions of microscopic stars look back at you. They blink, simultaneously, roll their celestial eyes and bat their comet-tail eyelashes.
You blink back, or maybe you wink, a sort of conversation, talking without talking. Then they just stare, those small fiberoptics littering the sky,
half of which are likely already dead, elderly light that takes so long to reach your blinking eyes that by the time yours are illuminated with it,
the original source is long gone, asleep.