Night Walk

It was night.

It could have been any time of day really but as the shyness of the moon hung over the two smokestacks upon the edge of town, now ceased in their billowing rumble, it could only have been night.
A small patch of a walkway circled its way up the hill close to my home and then after a short way ambled off toward the town’s only lookout.
A waist high brick wall–installed to keep people from walking on the garden bed–provided a slight break against the wind that blew against me as I began to stroll along this footpath, heading towards the top of Durack hill.
The heady breeze bloomed upward, marching with a grand purpose and carrying with it the smell of freshly laid tar from the road below. Breathing in the musty fragrance I could almost feel the heat off the road, the warm, tacky surface lain some hours ago and coating somthing that always seemed to be needing repair.
This walkway seemed to be like all the concrete in this polis: old, crumbling. It felt brittle, crunching lightly under my step as I wandered along, the noise reminding me of my young days trudging along a pebble strewn beach: stray logs from the northern rivers imitated by the occasional car that glided past me as I wandered alone by this gentle ocean’s tide.
It had been some time since I had left the polis.

An unproductive day had left me restless.
I paced about my lounge room with the kind of wound up restlessness that haunted me with inaction and left my linen cupboard in danger of being alphabetised.
Ten O’clock, Wednesday, and nothing is well.

What do normal people do on a Wednesday? Probably not things like talking to themselves on top of a hill about the nonsense of twinkling stars, thinking of them to be one by one jumping from the horizon and sprawling themselves across the rolling hills of our city, leaving behind the darkness of the sky, leaving behind the cold.
A gentle blur of fifty hertz and passing headlights that flickered and burned in a way that no star ever could. A brightness that they wish to forever be a part of.

I went for a walk.
It was late, why would someone just go for a walk?
People run, they go to gyms, everyone is so busy these days, they don’t just head out for a walk twenty-two hours into the day with no intention in mind.
I didn’t want to look weird, you see a guy just walking around in the dark and your mind jumps to conclusions, he’s up to no good, he’s gonna rob me. So I grabbed a Thermos and donned my friendliest looking scarf before I left.
What’s a guy with a Thermos doing out for a walk so late at night? He’s got plans, he wants to stay warm. What’s this silly bloke gotten himself into? Star-gazing? Night shift? He’s fine, he’s normal, he’s got a Thermos.
I didn’t have a plan though, just a listless wandering feeling that made my feet itchy and filled me with the pacing want to move, the need to just do something constructive.
So I did, Thermos under my arm I walked out of my front door and into the maw of directionlessness, lit by both moon and streetlight.

The footpath grew thin by the summit of Durak hill and eventually turned into only a mesh of trampled steel and compacted dirt. The wall here hung lower as it slowly petered out into the point where they probably ran out of bricks.
A solitary street lamp awaited me by the lookout’s platform; A lonely sentinel of painted iron looming abandoned atop this silent hill.
Watching the pair of shoes, thrown over the street lamp’s filigree, gently sway in the wind, I paced around the summit of this little lookout gazing at the distance that swept out before me.

Atop the hill I sit on a grimy bench and look out over the hills that lay beyond the Polis, dim lines of a blueish land that rises and falls into the hidden gullies of unimaginable knowing. Spirits dwell in places like this, a still lake and leafless tree surrounded by the unknown; a lichen covered rock inscribed with a single rune, time shall not touch these places and no eyes shall fall upon them in the darkness.
Turning I look over to the city behind me, a dense knit of buildings and interleaved roadways that tangle amongst one another, each street bathed in light so that it all may be seen; there’s no mystery in the polis.
The old section of town, lowly illuminated as if we offer it an aged reverence, still holds some fragments of magic within its shadows. Like the trees of the park that throw dancing whisps of playful movement across its dusty grass; or the majesty of what lies unseen upon the facade of the central library, poets and the styled bohemians sitting at peace upon its steps, discussing the mysteries of life and whatever may lie beyond.
So close to this weathered knot of sandstone stands the new skyline, the mass of architecture built to hold the harmony of light and life within its hands. Office buildings that look to be like columns of light reaching upward from the ground; the Metro stairwells, a beacon of blue and white, that descend down into the vaulted halls of mountain kings and lowly cobblers.

Alone at the top of a hill, I smile to myself.

It’s cold…
I should have put coffee in this Thermos.

---

J.McCray
2020