Headlights on vacant highways

It's always so peaceful early in the morning on a weekday. Between 3am and 5am, the city sleeps. I can drive and peacefully zone out to music without worrying so much about paying attention to the cars around me and their pilots. I can walk into a gas station to see the clerk cleaning the coffee pots for the coming morning rush or mopping a sheen back into the floor. The stray fox or raccoon watches me while I walk by from the nearest edge of shadow, usually near a gutter or barrier they love to strafe, turning their heads towards other cars making their eyes translucent green or yellow.

I have always been a star person. The day is alive, but alive with business. During the day, people seem so preoccupied with the miriade of distances, priorities and "tasks" they roam about on autopilot. I know that someone could clock my day down to the minute for the most part, from the time I wake till the time I get home. Daytime should be joyous, should be waking to the world, but it's become waking to business as usual. It's become far more frightening than welcoming and serene. When people are awake they can be selfish, they can connive and become sinister, but at night in the comfort of their bed and serenity of their dreams even the most malicious are at peace and for the rest of us, leaving us in peace. People are so sad and boring during sunlight.

I watch other night people, and it's more interesting. It could be because nights aren't so saturated with chaos that I notice more, but that's how it seems; night people ARE different, far more interesting. Ask anyone in the afternoon what they are doing and most likely they will say,

"I'm catching a bite to eat before I head back to work. Don't think I'm going to get another chance I have a ton of work to finish. Love to stay and chat but..."

Ask a night person, and you could never be prepared for the answers. It's not to say night people are weird, but to most people looking in it could easily look that way. Dark wide eyes and light skin. Jackets even in the peak of summer. Dirty vans to $2000 stilettos. The lipstick is more red than flesh, and the hair more free than gelled into conformity. Almost always they are alone, having left their friends to slumber locked inside a room, free to dream and be what they desire till the phone alarm screeches them to routine. They buy 3.2 beer to keep their buzzed heads buzzed. Some buy condoms with a smile for their lover drunk and singing in the car. Some buy blunt wraps and cigarettes, others gum and nachos. Night people are almost always smiling. Maybe it's because they are fucked up, maybe it's because everyone else is asleep and they have a few more hours to enjoy the world as we love it.

I'm not saying I don't like the sun, or enjoy my time in the day. The night is the same feeling I get when I realize my hangover is finally going away and I can think again, and the day is the drunk feeling right before I lose control and blackout.