West End Rebound

The night had always called to you, and you always answered the siren call. The calm of the night, even in the chaos and smudged lights of the city did more to combat your loneliness than crowds ever did, even with the empty streets and stars hidden from your view.  

You’ve written your name across this city, left a trail of brakelights and whispered dreams streaming across the streets, crisscrossing in so many ways it resembles a map of your heart, tattooed in streaks across the pavement.

Your soul has fought and bit and bled across this city, taking an unfamiliar place and bending it, folding it, burning it down to light the coals of your being, making it yours.

_

Neon signs began to feel more like friends than eyesores, often getting behind the wheel of your car and just driving in an attempt to move, to connect, to change with the hustle and bustle around you. In the dark of night, you could be anyone you ever wanted. Believe anything you wanted. Let the spotlights and streetlights wash over your skin and reveal the real you, the true you, one that the light of day had never become acquainted with.

Even though you longed for the stars, for the points of lights and tiny galaxies to reveal themselves to you even here, in the heart and the pulse of the city streets, never truly drenched in darkness and only revealed in the shadows that popped up between street lamps. Day and night, echoing in solemn clarity as you move through the streets like a ghost, revealing and hiding secrets and thoughts within one heartbeat to the next. The night always called to you, whispering secrets in your ears, whispering desire into your pulse with a pull more sweet than that of any lover. It pulled you out into the midst of the game, a part but always slight apart, an observer of the underbelly more than a partaker.

It was the night that made your eyes keen, made you notice the tiny details that others missed in the moonlight. It could be said it was some kind of sacrilege to worship the night in the middle of civilisation, where some had argued it never really existed, broken between one breath and the next by lights, sound, shattered hearts and shattered glass.

But it was this night that you cling to with all your strength, this night that you felt was truly yours, felt all the way to the marrow of your bones. This night that you let direct you, your cardinal north pointing whichever way the stars felt like shining, at their whim.

_

Illuminated by the glow from the dashboard, the streetlamps, you took on the hue of the life around you and made it your own. You were composed of chemicals now, boron blue and acid green, warm with the red of the neon on the corner, glowing false with love bought for and paid in full. You took all of this into you, made of street light, of shadow and secrets, moving through the city like you fashioned it all with your own hand.

Nothing ever felt truly yours like this night, this midnight that sang to your blood. You always found answers in the stars, content with throwing your thoughts out into galaxies and universes unknown as you traversed the city, more at home with the sky hearing your thoughts than the people on the ground. You, rooted in the earth, had always had a longing to fly, to flee, to move, and the stars held a promise you could never bear to turn from. They were always there, above and below and pressed into your skin, in ink and dark and shadow, even when they couldn't be seen. The old saying was that the city never slept. That was a lie. The streets stilled and grew silent, but the city never stopped breathing. It pulsed always, like a phantom organ that pulled at your skin and promised stories, stories and moments and life if you would only step out your front door. It caressed you, tracing your lips with a promise (belong, run, stay, fly) that changed with every shift of the wind.

Promises and lifetimes shifted in each flash of a headlight, in each door opening and each body tumbling out into the streets. Bleeding with possibilities innumerable, eons were made and destroyed in each passing second, dynasties climbing and falling with each step, each turn, each blink and each touch. 

_ Midnight was always there to catch you when you fell, wrapping around you with shadows sliding across your skin, rebounding you back to whatever misguided but well intentioned quest you had set out on. The truth of the night bit at you, nibbled away at your inhibitions as you watched each person fall behind the mask of who they wanted to be. But you, only you, found yourself with each minute ticking past midnight. You, who felt alive in the blue and dark of three am, who looked into every shadow and corner with more clarity than any drink or drug or just for a night partner could ever hope to bring.

You saw things that were, and are, and had not yet been with each passing through the streets, slinking through the arteries of the city and speaking a language that few paid any mind to listen to anymore.

Tongue loosened and soul warmed by whiskey, you whispered potentials into the night, setting them alight like fireflies and sparking the sky with your maybes. You created your own stars here in the center of chaos, content to draw those around you inwards, unthinkingly drifting towards your gravity like a black hole, whispering them forward and promising to hold their secrets close, to never let them see the light of day. You drink those secrets like wine, the truth and lies bursting on your tongue, the minutes on the clock blinking towards dawn, towards order, routine, and destruction.

You lived in the night, having decided once to never cherish the day.

You draw the shadows around you, allowing them to replace your armour and dress you in starlight. You, who were born in the morning but ruled over the night,

this kingdom of neon and starlight

that belonged to everyone

and no one