I miss midnight
XoreIt occurs to me as i meander home after yet another long evening of revelry, that I miss midnight. In an effort not to be ambiguous: I do not mean that i often check my watch and it’s a minute later, shucks I missed it again! No, what I mean is that growing up on the outskirts of suburbia, there was a certain sort of forbidding that surrounded that final stroke of the day, when all were snug away in their beds slumbering, the witching hour. I find that the very concept is elusive to me nowadays.
I suppose i wonder to myself why I’m even talking about it. When growing up: I kind of miss it for that hour I could sneak out of the house and let my eyes drink in the pitch black, too far from the city for it’s persistent lights to illuminate the sky, at best a very hazy dim glow on the horizon, backlighting trees: transforming them into motionless, dark brooding sentinels of the night, when everything is mysterious and no longer subject to the rigorous determinisms of people and places that you move around but never touch: You can move freely without effect, nobody to see, or care, no missteps to be made. Elective sensory deprivation: Moving about, only being sure of your steps if you probed around with your feet beforehand or (for shame!) brought a flashlight to light your way. Flashlights! Aside from the occasional local power outage, I haven’t needed to use one of those things in many years (I swear I need to go camping sometime soon.)
A big factor happens to be merely where I live. For example, as I sauntered home this evening at the early [sic] hour of twenty past twelve, despite a clouded and otherwise starless sky, it was a perfectly lit, both from the lights of nearby urban populations reflecting off the bottom of the clouds, to the burning street lamps that light your every step, bright as day. No longer is there an obvious visual factor that tells you if it’s ten, twelve, or three: all are valid guesses. When the city never sleeps, when exactly is that dead hour supposed to fall?
So there is that obvious presence of the wakeful population, streets given to as much traffic at midnight as you would find on a weekday, after the morning rush hour but well before the lunch congestion. Higher populations lend to greater quantities of night owls like myself. Do I feel justified in ignoring this hour because everyone else does? Is there a need for justification? Is it even a relevant concept?
The bigger part of it, though, is just the unfortunate fact that I have grown up, and now regularly stay up well past it and on occasion well into the next day also. There’s nothing mysterious about a very late hour when your current habits make it something of an early hour. What used to be the full stop, the point in time to pull the plug and call it a night, when your eyes grew dim and you faded away… is now nothing more than a hint that you should start packing it up within the next two hours. Maybe. Perhaps then, it boils down to the chronic sleep deprivation i subject myself to: It’s the penultimate excuse to get to bed at a decent hour.
I miss midnight.