Gone With the Nightfall

“We’ll talk about it in the morning.” they always said. Those were the words that officially ended yet another day that contained more waiting than working. Those were the words that ended a new conversation before it started, the words that brought a quick and easy solution that was long overdue.

Nobody liked worrying more than they needed to in the dead of night when the moon and the stars and empty shadows had already claimed their place in the sky. The people we once knew as pragmatists became procrastinators. These hours no longer belonged to the turmoil and disorder that the sun brought during the day. The night brought a whole new world with it, along with a new sky.


The night was a phenomenon that everybody viewed as untouchable. The intricate horrors that happened in the corners of the streets and roads were spoken of in hushed voices, as if they were second nature; as if the night was born to be dangerous, formidable, and avoided at all costs.

Ever since we were young, my brother and I were forced to go to bed unreasonably early, when we were far from tired and wide awake. Even if we were up craming for a big test or just couldn’t fall asleep, we had to be in bed long before 8 o’clock, or else.

“Or else what?” I asked years ago, wondering what it was the night brought that was so horrid I always had to be the first one to look away.

“Or else you’ll be miserable in the morning.” was all my mother said.


Sleep. It was a drug that was forced down our throats since we came into the world. When we were little, we slept because the night bore sights that weren’t fit for children, because drifting off into oblivion was all we did. But even in my adolescent years now, sleep became less of a means of refreshment and more of a means of escaping reality to me. Sleeping in, waking up at 2 pm and thinking they day was already wasted became my way of living… except it wasn’t really living, just hiding from the rest of the world like a crab hides under a rock. And that didn’t sit well with anyone.

My brother and I were supposed to be Renaissance men who were able to effortlessly beat the alarm clock with our own bare hands. We were never night owls, but that didn’t mean we were morning people either. We were still miserable in the morning, even when we went to bed earlier than the sun did. We lived half of our lives in a mass of sheets and pillows, pressing snooze over and over again.

“What,” my brother murmured when the alarm clock went off at 4 am today. “Does the little machine dictate when your morning starts? If it went off at 2 am, would you really get up at 2 am?”

We knew that our problems would resurface the moment we were officially awake, and we both decided that we could only endure them for so long. The longer we were awake, the more mud we would all have to trudge through throughout the day until we reached the dry land when it became dark.

So if anyone dared to ask a complicated question on what we were supposed to do, if anyone dared to voice any of the problems we had that we knew wouldn’t go away with the sun at the horizon — the fear of the inevitable foreclosure that poisoned the air, our expulsion from yet another university, the fact that we were all only playing at being rich and almost all our wealth was squandered due to bad investments, that peace had failed us and a new kind of war was brewing — the day couldn’t seem to end fast enough. As soon as the sky appeared to be darkening, we would all rush to blow out all the candles, to close the curtains, to flip all the lights off, put our heads on our pillows that were still damp with tears and sweat that still hadn’t dried, and try to fall into a deep, inescapable sleep.


We did what we could in the time the sun allowed us; we did what we could in the face of the complete disarray that we had put our own lives in. We did what we could regardless of everything else that stood in our way and breathed down our necks until the sun told us that our time was up and we just couldn’t stand any of it anymore. We did what we could until our time ran out and the sun would tell us that what we had done would be enough for now.

But reality — the thick, massive clouds obscured by the trees, buildings, and the moonlight that emulated our hidden misery — told us the exact opposite. It was a slap in the face; a bitter, depressing lullaby that made our eyes grow heavy instead of persist well past midnight.

The Morning, Tomorrow, and the Future

“Things always look better in the morning.”
It was another lie we told ourselves, for things never looked better in the morning, no matter how bright the sun shined. It blinded us from every opportunity the night gave us to look everything in the eye.
No, that was for the future.


My brother and I were told the very thing all parents tell their children at least a dozen times — “You are the future. Something keeps telling me that somehow, you’ll find a way. But not now. Never in this asinine decade.”

We all got the message. We were the leaders of the future. We chanted it as a mantra in our minds; it was what got us through — this notion that young people had this innate ability to pick up all the rubble from previous generations and rattle the stars. Nobody taught us how to go about doing these things when the time arrived, for we would be caught up in the very thing we had been locked away from since infancy — the night.
We weren’t raised to brave the dark wilderness.

What no one noticed was that the night formed a bridge to tomorrow, not just the morning. The morning was my family’s excuse for not pushing the boundaries the night tested and tomorrow was our daily grind.

There was an infinite sea of mornings and tomorrows, so when was anyone supposed to know when the future really began?

“You’ll grow up, and you’ll know it when you experience it.” My father answered my brother, who had asked the same question. He patted my brother on the shoulder in that obnoxious patronizing way he always did, as if reassuring a simple-minded child.

That was what all of our elders would say, even as we would transition into adulthood. They would continue to say it as we would gray with age. And when we descended into our graves, they would say, “They were the leaders of the future.”

We would have been the leaders of the future until we stopped and became the leaders of the morning instead. The leaders of the dreaded rising sun and alarm clocks and waiting for the sun to go down again. The leaders of endless wasted tomorrows, of afternoons and evenings, but never the leaders of the night. For that was the only time when we could ever know what would become of the future. That was our only chance to reflect and find out if the future really was this time of reform and revolution that everybody made it out to be instead of a continuity of the abysmal present.

And we would all waste it, by going to bed when we weren’t tired and avoiding its hidden beauties.


They said change didn’t happen overnight, but what was there to keep us from trying? What would be left in the future, after we had passed up every opportunity that had come our way now?

The future didn’t discriminate, between the leaders of the night and the morning and tomorrow and everything in between. Under its eyes, the children of the next generation were the leaders of the now, kept in waiting, overnight.

Hopes & Dreams

Dream and Exceed!

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Bridgette Adu-Wadier

Written by

Student | Graphic Design and Fiction Enthusiast | Amateur Writer | Study Machine

Hopes & Dreams

Dream and Exceed!

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