2300hrs
This is a time for lovers. As the rest of the world makes their way
home, rests beneath their sheets, sleeps on the MRT, beats their wives,
runs out of things to say to their friends, makes plans to meet
hopefully sometime again this year, wonders why their children are not
home yet. As the rest of the rest of the world, the lost and the wild
and the exuberant, brushes teeth and puts on makeup, tries on six
different outfits perhaps meant to seduce or maybe merely meant to
restore some sense of self-worth, the only way that's left? As they
slink their separate desolate ways back to their respective
sanctuaries/hells, into their double locked gates and abuse or their
dark clubs and gyration and excess and loss of self.
These streets are for lovers. The sidewalks meant for two and the
two-seat benches at parks and the alcoves barely sufficient for two
bodies bound by the belief and the fear that the world consists only of
the other.
The quiet is for lovers. For murmurred declarations of love, for
philosophy and the separate pursuit of the only question that matters:
is love enough? and the follow up: how can it not be? For
frenzied-hand-scrabbling in the dark and the urgency of motion.
0400hrs
This is a time for nobody. For the nobodies who make up so much of
everybody. As the rest of the world dreams, lies in restful oblivion. As
the rest of the rest of the world slips out of darkened spaces, makes
plans for real food and real sustenance despite fatigue and drunkenness
and disappointment, pretends desperately that life is not slipping away,
that the excesses of youth can be replicated without any consequences.
This is a time for regrets and terrible decisions. As you lie awake at
night wondering at the consequences of all these things over all these
years, as you make unsound promises to yourself to effect change at
last, as you begin even to believe yourself and that these 4am
epiphanies actually represent a turning point in your
could-be-so-much-better life, as these late-night visitations of wisdom
and revelation occur again and again and again, as you wonder how much anything has changed at all.
1500hrs
This is a time for [fill in the blank]. Who are you without the urgency
of the night and the madness of deep morning? Who do you think of in the
middle of the day before you are assailed by the doubt and loneliness
and sorrow of nightfall? [Who thinks of you?] What do you mean most of
the time, unmasked by sunlight, stripped of shadows and the poor excuse
of alcohol and the mumbled pleas of sorry I'm just really tired?
