Nocturnal

 The night has always been one of my greatest allies. It has given me company without robbing me of my solitude. 

As I walked up to the terrace, I remembered the nights. All the nights that I've been comforted by the night sky, the twinkling stars, and the low breeze that ruffled my hair ever so slightly. I haven't been frequent to the terrace recently. 

I plugged my headphones into the smartphone, browsing for music that would be a better fit for this night. One of the earpieces would work, the other refused to accompany me to melody, holding me back to the present. I wondered if this is what existence is, an endless series of daydreams and hopeful yearnings that were undercut by the unyielding, concrete reality. 

Tonight was lonely, peaceful and yet noisy and full of character. I saw the cat next door yawn a big yawn, exposing its fangs and go back to its nap. I saw smaller bats that would often flutter over the treetops. There wasn't much moonlight, but whatever peeked from within the clouds, reached through the leaves of the coconut tree next to the house, crissed and crossed into a pattern where I stood. I saw our elderly neighbour sitting in an armchair on his verandah, gazing into the darkness. I remember how he fell silent after fate claimed him as a widower last year. Now he would almost always be seen in his armchair, gazing into the darkness, until he was called to dinner. 

Perhaps he was looking at the warm orange glow of the metropolitan street on the horizon, playing out a fond memory with his wife? Perhaps it was something else altogether. A simple memory that had accumulated dust over the years, so dense that it was almost something new. I wouldn't know. 

My mother had petunias planted all along the parapet. As the breeze would blow, a couple of leaves would casually brush past my elbow. The petals and the leaves would faintly glimmer in the moonlight. Maybe they were putting up a show just for me. I remembered one of the lectures in college. Human reality is a “revealer”, burdened with the responsibility to make meaning out of it all. “The world appears as the horizon of our situation, as the infinite distance that separates us from ourselves...”, I recalled. 

I sat on the terrace for long, listening to my one-sided music, the cacophony in the house next door as the eldest female member called on to the others for dinner, the distant noise of traffic, the low hum of a radio being played somewhere. And amidst all the chaos, maybe, just maybe, there was a simple harmony. Like the raindrops that shine on the cobweb, or the dust particles that float around in the sunlight, settling down finally. 

As time passed, the lights in the houses across the horizon went out one after the other. The cacophony gradually eased away. Some of the stars flickered and died, some shone brighter. 

And the night? The night gave me company without robbing me of my solitude.