I’m not going to bother talking about what will happen before dark. For one thing, you will be there to experience the twilight hours alongside me, but, more importantly, the most especial events always occur once the daystar is gone from the sky.

There’s the initial excited fear as we walk down the twisting streets leading away from my hill, plummeting us into a darkness filled with the thumping and whirring of machines sucking pollution out of a nearby pond. After reaching level ground once more, we can go to the dock with its late night fishermen and the occasional couple frolicking under fluorescent lampposts. Behind the band shell there are bushes in which I have come across people making out at different times, not quite as hidden as they think. Or, if you want, we could go in a completely opposite direction: alongside a busy road, clambering over boulders and through scratchy weeds to walk on a smelly stretch of beach typically covered with washed up bay refuse. Further still, there’s the cracked and dirty street leading up past barking dogs outside of a Chinese restaurant toward woods with hidden pathways that I haven’t even explored on my own yet for rootless fears of dark. Maybe, if our travels go on long and far enough, we will even run across the side street lined with low, shoddily painted houses with the blue light of countless television sets visible through thinly veiled windows. Few trees to shade the private lives of the inhabitants here, yet the street lamplights fill the gutter with gold. At the right time, it is possible to find some sort of beauty in such a stereotypical American scene as this: a one level, tin roofed house complete with a broken down car resting on concrete blocks atop grass burned and burnished by the sun. And this is just the beginning. The night could end back at home, or we could render time delineations meaningless celebrating the return of day on a swing set in some abandoned playground. So many possibilities.

Of course, you won’t even be there in person to see any of this. Maybe not physically, but I still carry you in my pocket as notebook and pen. And it will all be transcribed, bringing us together with words while you sleep, far away, participating in something without even being aware.

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