The night out

The night began innocently. Like children we sat on a balcony five floors up from the earth. I contemplated the moonlight refracted in a puff of smoke, a little poof that mixed with the warmth of breath to color the sky with its cloudiness. The time came to roam, and to the streets we skipped like kids in an outdoor candy shop. On Mallette Street we stopped, down by the building site, amongst the old houses on the hill. We entered one and it was filled with the noises of people, the rumble of celebration.

I spoke with a lady who said she collected skeletons, and she asked me about the best I’d ever found. I answered a dolphin, no, a porpoise. She asked me if it was purple. I said a porpoise would never turn purple unless it held its breath on purpose. Soon she dismissed me for being a fool and I wandered back into the forest.

There were some trees behind the house, and they reminded me of nighttime woodland. Men would walk behind the house, towards the trees, to “go on vacation” as one would say to me. It was nature’s call. They’d emerge from the darkness, from the wood, and I greeted them one by one, saying welcome, magical forest man. Welcome to my land. Some of them laughed but others walked right past me and into the other night. Some of them laughed and disappeared into the festive house where the bathroom was occupied most of the time.

I noticed a beautiful bar with beautiful faces behind the counter. Bottles opened up, forgotten, emptied of their essence. Some were given new life, filled with water from the tap; others cast upon the floor, their bellies up towards the ceiling. Then everybody went away, and left it all in sad abandon. And I too went away, discarded.

I wandered back towards the street, away from the place I’d been thrown away, towards the same old street, away from where I’d not been kept. And as I did so my thoughts spun in many circles like some reinvented wheel. When I found that I’d returned to home, as I came down from the hills, as I discarded myself and became content in silence.