Always Night

Night walking / 2022 / Photo by RCS

Who doesn’t love widening circles of streetlight lights glowing on night-shadowed sidewalks? No one I know. Certainly no one around here. Place this picture in your mind, and then you’ll know what’s what. Here, in Nightsville, you can walk to the edge of town where night mists out into a wall of shadowy fog, feeling the darkest foggiest fog you’ve ever felt. You see, night is a place as much as it is a feeling. People either feel a sense of freedom at night, or a pressing presence. Over by the docks, you can breathe in midnight blue waves, and watch the black horizon gradually turn charcoal gray. This town was built on dreams of travelers and the walking wounded ones of life who longed for a place of ultimate darkness to stay hidden inside, cozied away from the outside world—living holed-up within their own skulls, where they'd make intricate drawings of a tomorrow they’d never reach. Rainbows exist only in faded calendar photos tacked to the beer-stained wall at the corner speakeasy. Hunched over beers and shots, stories told by the denizens of Open-All-Night revolve around dilemmas and dissections of the unquenchable darkness, their conversations hold a dense type of gravity—while still keeping it light enough to continue darkly telling strange tales, deeper into the night.