Night Falls in Los Angeles

Night falls early in Los Angeles. It creeps up the walls of the building where I work like a snake unfolding from a long nap, yawning, stretching. Like the blankets that cover me when I sleep at night, it envelops the window I sit next to. And, like the slow creek of an old door, or the soft whispers of an aging house, it slowly and gracefully gives into the darkness, changing from a dusty gray to a black night scattered with lights of buildings and billboards and cars, and the occasional star.

There's a chill, these nights, when you walk to your car by moonlight; a certain briskness that awakens you to the night, as though night and morning casually switched places. The drive home becomes crammed with others eager to get home to the warm, to food, to inside light. Under the awning of the tree-lined streets and bumpy Los Angeles sidewalks, joggers and walkers scatter the night like rats; their breathing and huffing and puffing heard as you lock your car door, walk up your steps.

Houses and apartments, once just regular and perhaps boring, are creeping out from hibernation to don strings of twinkling Christmas lights. From windows and doorways flows music and smells of hearty dinners. Down the street, a group walks to the bars and restaurants on Wilshire, laughing, arms linked. Perhaps, even further down Wilshire, a homeless person sits in a doorstep of an abandoned business, seeking warmth, food, money. Company. A girl waits on the corner to be picked up by her date, maybe, or maybe her parents. Through a window I see a man reading by the light of a lone lamp.

Perhaps, in the dark corners of the night, a secret is being told, hands are being held. Perhaps tears are streaming down someone's face like train tracks. Perhaps, somewhere, in the night, someone is inspired like an artist; awakened from sleep by a dream; or up late, with eyes wide open, wondering about life and this great big world.