Tag: night

024 – the last drag

It’s the end of my pack. Mixed feelings about it. San Francisco doesn’t sell menthol cigarettes anymore and the kid in me will probably not buy the regular ones. So it’s my last cigarette tonight. It’s a pity cigarettes are so small, and short. It’s a pity their magic (??) is so ephemeral. I want to make sure I enjoy it, so I make sure to take all my things downstairs. My mask, in case I want to take a walk after. I step out, make sure there’s not a bunch of cars around before I light it up. 

I take slow drags, it’s my last cigarette. 

Before I know it, I’m down to the last few drags. As I contemplate the last couple drags that are generally smoky and carry a rougher taste, I think of you. The last time I saw your face. Before it turned ashy.

I decide not to take those last couple drags. I stomp it out. Nip it before it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. Wish I could have done the same with you. 

I don’t want to step back inside. There’s pleasure in being outside under the cloudless, starless sky. Bach plays from my earphones, an attempt to feel and to set my creative juices flowing. I want to write tonight, I want to publish a post. Work’s been busy so I’ve been a prisoner to my desk, tasks, and deadlines. I didn’t meet my annual targets so there’s a desperation to not let that discourage me. To not let that happen again. 

I look at my phone, check my Instagram, dabbing on addictive behavior on the ruins of another. I close it before I can find myself sucked into it. I contemplate a walk. I hate my block, it’s all uphill and downhill, it takes away from the peace and pleasure of the walk sometimes. My heavy breaths like horns in the middle of the night. I decide to do it anyway. Won’t go far, but will get to delay going back inside. Sometimes it’s better to do something simply to get away from the contemplation of it. I’m writing slower tonight, more thoughtfully, don’t want this to be a plain thought dump. Five hundred words don’t come that easily these days but the solution is not always as simple as writing mindlessly.

There’s white flowers on the large shrub that breaks through the wrought-iron gate of the neighboring building. I wish I knew what they’re called. There’s also a ton of trash right around. Stray white plastic forks, knives and unopened hot sauce packets. Who throws these out? Did they fall out by mistake or was it perhaps a homeless person eating takeout food? Who knows, this city is weird with its people.

I reach the intersection, I contemplate going around the block. I turn back. The other side is a steeper climb. A light comes on as I pass one of the apartments, as if to remind me where I am. As if to say it knows I don’t want to be disturbed but it can’t help its routine. Maybe someone who wanted to park in its garage would have appreciated it, but not me. I can’t.

I come back to my apartment building, I climb up slowly. I don’t want to go home. I want to sit outside and write. It’s easier to write when I can feel the outside air on my skin. There’s a potential that doesn’t exist inside the walls of my house. I’m tired from the climb. My small heavy breaths and my reluctant footsteps are all I have for two whole flights. It feels harder to breathe with my mask on. I take it off, surely I’m not going to bump into anyone now.

I’m back in my room, I’m on auto-pilot. I knew I was going to write tonight from the moment I’d wrapped up my work for the day. From the moment I’d managed to wind up the dishes alongside of the last few tasks I had. I knew I was going to write from the moment I’d promised myself the smoke. If I could manage to finish all my work.

I see a text from my friend. I’d texted her when I was out earlier. I wanted to tell her about my last cigarette. She says I should call her if I’m still free. I call her. We only speak for six minutes, since I don’t feel like talking anymore. I turn off the music, I open the windows to let some air come in. Maybe it can be nice from inside too.

I’ve been reading a book which has beautiful descriptions of a small town in 1980s Italy. They’re not the words of someone who’s imagined it all. The author was probably there. He probably must have spent many nights exploring the town on his own bicycle. They’re very descriptive descriptions. I’d forgotten how good that can sometimes feel to read. Building those images in the imagination. It’s only thoughts, but it almost feels like a sensory pleasure sometimes. It’s been quite inspiring, to say the least.

This is turning reflective now since I’m not doing anything anymore. I’ll stomp it out. Nip it before it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. 

019a – ghost town

They sit on a park bench overlooking the Painted Ladies, unsure about their place in the world. She knows where they are, she doesn’t know what they’re doing there. Tiny drops of water grace their shoulders as they let the almost silence settle between and around them. Almost silent – not completely so. There’s the sound of the rain and the cars, to start with. There’s also the light chatter of the last few people who haven’t gone home yet. Or some who’ve stepped out again. Almost silent – not completely so. That’s how it mostly feels in her head as well. It’s almost midnight, she never really steps out of the house this late unless it’s to visit people in their homes or to come back from such visits. It’s been ages since she’s been out out this late. She hadn’t realized San Francisco on Sunday nights is almost ghost town.

The night’s precious to her, it always has been.

She wishes she’d feel safe, she could enjoy it so much more.

She wonders what she’s doing with life, giving her time to strangers, putting herself in strange, new (sometimes terrifying) situations, hoping to feel something. She’s trying to figure out what she wants from life, though she knows she may never really end up figuring it out. She’s recently started taking medication for anxiety and depression and she can’t wait for it to take effect, there’s a huge part of her that can’t wait to feel normal, in some ways.

“How do you not know what you like?”, he asks, sending her into a spiral of self-doubt again. How does she not know what she’s into? Is it really that easy for most people?

She knows she doesn’t like the cold and the rain and feeling unsafe. She always knows what she doesn’t like, she’s not as articulate with the rest. She doesn’t feel fully safe here in this city but she doesn’t want to go home, either. She’s not sure what’s holding her here. It’s not the promise of riches, or career prospects.. it’s something else. There’s this idea of accessibility that she’s unable to let go of. She’s been interacting with cool people online and a lot of them aren’t based out of her home country. A lot of them are based out of the country she’s currently living in – America, the land of opportunity. It was never really her dream, but now that she’s lived her for a while, she’s found dreamlike things about it.

He doesn’t offer a lot of information about himself unless she asks, so there’s always a lull in the conversation as she contemplates follow-ups. He never really denies when she does ask though, and that keeps it going for them.

She’s changed her mind about wanting to make money out of writing, she saw some numbers and was disillusioned, at least for the time-being. She knows she doesn’t love her day job but she’s trying to make it work, until some of the other pieces fall into place, even if they do so for a little while. She’s only 25, she doesn’t know why she’s so worried. She doesn’t even know if she wants a conventional life – the house, the family, the kids. She knows it’s just natural selection trying to do its job, making her believe she’s short on time. It’s an everyday struggle, one she can’t seem to find her way out of.

She’s always on the edge lately, except for when she’s sleeping or eating. She’s started holding a lot of the anxiety in her body, since she’s become afraid of holding it in her brain. There was a time when staying home felt consistently safe to her, that’s not the case anymore.

It’s raining heavier now, they decide to head back. They walk over the mulch and the mud, she complains about her shoes. He doesn’t care as much. 

The night’s precious to him, it always has been. 

018b – thoughts are cheap, my darling

She sits in a chair and looks at the pink lilies sitting on the table. She’s divided them into different bottles since she didn’t have a vase to put them out into, but she’s happy with the arrangement. She’s grateful for the one who helped her pick them out, she’s not sure if she’d have bought them if she was alone. She doesn’t fully get why these small acts of kindness make her so happy, but they do. She feels a little silly when she thinks about all of this, but she’s also happy it’s generating words for her.

Night time’s precious to her, it always has been. She tries to conform to societal rhythms to function better but she just does so much better from the hours of ten and three. She now thinks of it with the context of her generalized anxiety, and it makes much more sense. Lesser interruptions, fewer people demanding things from her, lesser accountability, fewer things for her to solve..

She doesn’t actually have problems with focus. She knows she’s good at focusing for hours on end if the conditions are right. Conditions that the night easily provides. She doesn’t think it’s super sustainable though, since waking up around eleven in the morning leaves her with little time to chase the sun.

She’s been using these friendly hours to write lately, but she might have to consider using them to catch up with some of the work from her day job. It’s quite ironic, she knows that.

Even the motorbikes don’t sound as noisy when she’s writing about them at 12 am. They drive her crazy at 7 pm though. She wonders if if she can use the flexibility of working remotely to her advantage. She knows she was enjoying it all when they’d just started out, almost a year ago. She doesn’t know when it all went haywire.

One thing she likes about the act of writing is how she can go from “thinking” to “doing” without much effort. She knows it’s almost common knowledge how thinking is easier than doing, and writing allows her to become a doer, for whatever it’s worth. Even if it’s often a thought dump, she likes how she ends up with something to show for it. For the time she spends thinking said thoughts.

It wasn’t easy tonight. She got distracted multiple times, she got distracted by the internet, she got distracted by tiny chores. But at some level, she knew it would happen as long as she came back to it. She recently read something about how there’s five elements to the human experience. These are – the form, the perception, the feelings, the mentality and the awareness. She thinks when she writes like this she’s almost speaking from the awareness’s perspective. It’s interesting to her, she almost becomes detached from the other four. And maybe she does. She likes to believe she does. When one becomes detached from the other four, they’re left with a purified form of awareness, she’s heard them say. She likes the idea of it. Ideally though, she’d want to be detached from the awareness as well. But it’s okay if that’s too far into the future.

She knows she’s taking it one week at a time, one day at a time, a few paragraphs at a time. That’s all she can do, really.

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