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Long Night's Sleep

Even as a child, I was averse to sleep.  I was the kid in Boy Scouts who got out of his sleeping bag once I was sure everyone was snoring. The night whispers to me, even more so with a campfire.  The embers stay hot for a very long time, though thy may not appear so.  In the morning, all you'd have to do was stir up the dead gray ashes to find the glittering deep heat beneath.  Toss on some tinder and voila, fire is born again. At 2 in the morning, the flames were merely napping, easily aroused to continue their hypnotizing dance.  How many times did I crawl back into the tent when the stars began to vanish? How many times did I pretend to have woken early?

Sometimes I would walk the unknown wilderness while the world slept.  This habit has continued into my adult life.  Whenever I visit a friend in a new city, I inevitably find myself walking alone through the night.  One snowy dawn in Chicago I found myself at the end of the Navy Pier, silent and trackless but for my presence.  I've wandered Manhattan, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis (before and after I moved here), Kansas City, Indianapolis, Washington D.C, Anchorage, and country roads of Ireland that few tourists see.  There is a sense of solitude that cannot be found until almost everyone else is asleep. In the city, there is always life. Fireworks shots sound for three months after the Fourth of July, bartenders coming home, cats wailing at each other, and always and forever the drone of the highways.  

Winter nights are the best, cold air killing the sound in the air and icy conditions keeping all but those who must (or must not be told otherwise) away from the roads. When the only sound I can hear is the soft and steady crunch of my own footsteps in snow, I am almost in the distant mountains again. Truly the most solitude one can find is there on an old dead rock at midnight above the tree line. The night sky has its own voice, but there near the peak in my memory there is a fog - a literal cloud hovering around us, silencing too the stars. The silence was actually too severe for my liking, but it was and will remain the pinnacle of quiet in my mind. Night's hush is enough for me. Knowing I have stretched my consciousness further brings me pride, and I have no intention of going to sleep. 

At least, I didn't. Until the night that never ended, in which no one would awake.

 It was the night of my unraveling. I alone walked in the land of slumber as even the highways fell silent.  I watched helplessly as they all began to fade, and I began to hallucinate men made of shadows who fed on the sleepers.  At least, I hope I'm hallucinating...

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