And So I Run At Night

Dusk falls over the world in a powdery shadow. The light is slowly suffocated out of the day, taking all colour with it. Then blackness; pure night blackness. Nothing. Empty sky.

Then stars.
Filling the night canvas with millions of tiny, metallic holes.

My breath comes out as smoke in the strikingly cold, dark air. My body is frigid with the coldness, so I move quickly; thinking little, feeling even less. The world seems strangely still, time has somehow stopped. Everything around me is frozen.

Except I move through it. I run and run and run, my only source of freedom I ever feel now. When I run, I am going somewhere away. There is never a known destination, I only know I am leaving here. And that is enough.

I'm in the field now. I have let myself pause along side the rest of my faded world. Complete, swallowing isolation envelopes me wholly. But it gives me comfort. No one has the slightest notion of me being here; no one has any idea. There is the magnificant vast palette all around me, and I have become a tiny, insignificant whisp of a life that no one can see, no one knows, no one or nothing can reach. I am embedded in my surroundings. I am simply a contribution to the scenery; merely the landscape of something better. With or without, it makes no difference. I am nothing.

But it satisfies me entirely. I feel truly myself somehow.

The stars again. How the silver glows of the night can be so beautiful is beyond me. On and on they shine. Reminding me that they will never stop, that they will always sparkle in stark contrast to the rest of the shadowy blackness. Reminding me that I am not like them.

I look ahead, and everything I see seems better than the place I came from. There is so much infront of me, so much that I want to become a part of. Anywhere, my body screams. Just move. Move into the ebony blanket ahead; forward and further and further.

And so I look behind. No, my body is weeping. It is too broken to yell anymore, too scared for words. Too shattered to hope any longer. It cries almost inaudibly into the thin air around me. But it already knows.

I pick up the earth in my hands. The cool, dirty crumbles are trying to tell me something, but I no longer hear. The earth is its own again.