- Vol. 04
- Chapter 09
This Night Me
And when I get home there is the smell of rush-hour traffic in the air. The cars have gone from the streets but their trail can be followed back in time. It has driven its way into my home and about my furniture, up my nostrils and I find I have a care for the air when the sun’s not there. A night-time regret blooms at sunset, this night me disadvantaged to make its mark due to the need for sleep. It’s now when I kick off my shoes that I see the day me in a different light, this artificial light from the sixty watt bulb of my lamp. I feel the indigestion from rich food, I smell cigars on my clothes and my skin, breathe the toxicity from an absent hubbub, and rub creams where the foreign girl bit me.
This stillness of space, but not of mind, has me nightly reconsidering my place. I mean to do good for my constituents but there are distractions in natural light that are absent now. The jokes of my driver that I laughed at then are out of place and jar with this night me. The decisions I made in the cold light of day, the hard and difficult decisions, are out of step with the good I’d expected to do. It was this night me who settled upon the notion in the first place. It was this night me, those years ago, who saw things clearly without the distractions and chose a political life of good intentions. Daily, the distractions that appear in natural light swerve me off-course unknowingly until night. Nightly, I regret my actions of the day but instead of this night me finding a way to convince the day me to adopt my night thinking I take myself to bed. This complicit night me takes the necessary steps to initiate a switching off of who I am in the artificial light and in the morning, when all the distractions return in the natural light, I will be that day me again and those jokes will be funny and I will smoke cigars and make the hard decisions and I will forgive the smell of the air since the cars help that day me maintain the lifestyle this undistracted night
This Night Me
me despises. I will be cruel. I will be perverted. I will be that day me. In the morning I will think of these clear thoughts thought in artificial light without distractions and think them artificial and due to a lack of sleep and a lack of distractions, due to a need for sleep, a need for distractions.
I will ring Robert tomorrow and see if there is night work I can take on. And at first this night me will struggle doing the things the day me takes in his stride but in the end the struggle will become the very distraction this night me needs to keep that day me living right throughout the night.