Footsteps sunk into the room from the apartment above and dialogue from a movie playing down the hall was muffled by the walls. Crickets played their repetitive music. Cars drove by intermittently, with traffic slowed from the daytime flow to the nighttime lull. A man was shouting down the street, interjecting his voice into the otherwise calm summer fade. The screaming city was getting as much rest as the people inside it would let it have.
Keeping my eyes closed took more effort than leaving them open. I couldn’t sleep, so I stared at the ceiling and listened to the dry breeze make passes through the small gap between the window and the sill. I had a lot of unresolved worries and questions; without closure, my day didn’t feel conclusive.
When there’s a show with episodes that usually end with resolved stories and one episode suddenly comes up with a “to be continued” notice at the end, there’s an urge to immediately move onto the next episode. At that moment, I felt like my day was the equivalent to an episode like that and I wanted to watch the next one right away to get the answers I needed, but I had to wait. All I could do was obsessively think over the moments that were stuck in my head and guess what the answers to my questions might be.
I got up from the bed and redressed myself: a grey shirt, standard blue jeans, and a pair of black leather shoes. After putting on my shoes, I stayed on the floor for a minute more to look around and to set up a vague plan for the walk I would take myself on. I thought about going to that stone staircase at the end of the neighborhood a few blocks north, the steep road with a contemporarily geometric house surrounded by classic victorians, maybe to the top of the hill.
I made my way out the door, down the hall, down the stairs, and out the building. I turned West and started walking. The yelling man had stopped. The crickets were still playing their songs. The the streets were still being illuminated by the occasional car driving by. I walked down the street, no detours, no change of direction. I didn’t go to the staircase, to the steep road, or to the top of the hill. The path I was walking on felt pneumatic. Setting myself in motion expedited my train of thought, providing me with the right level of distraction to cut away the thought patterns that were hindering progress through my overgrown field of worries.
There were definitive answers to some of the questions I had, but I was left with plenty more that I would have to wait for the continuation of the story to answer for itself. I set them aside, kept walking, and put my focus back on the night. I felt the freshly chilled air brush against my dry skin and fill my lungs. I took pleasure in the muffled city sounds. I was enamored by the cityscape that changes so completely from sunshine to moonlight and I was thankful that it offered me the meditative milieu I needed to ease my aggressively active thoughts.