Dusk

I love being out at dusk.
It always reminds me of Madrid.

It reminds me of evenings when the streets and squares are teeming with life. Young kids running around playing tag, their parents, grandparents and neighbours talking, yelling, singing all around them. It reminds me of a vibrant life, a city alive, a point in time I was consumed with love. It reminds me of the evenings I would walk to language class, forging life as a local, settling in a foreign space for a while. Evening is a time of comfort in the familiar, it happens everywhere, every day, and helped me feel that this life was my home. It was the same time I fell in love with the city, every day.

Evening reminds me of being a tourist.

Even at home. Of wandering, exploring a city as it calms down, before awakening for the evening ahead. It’s a hectic time, but for a tourist can be a lonely, quiet, in between time. When locals head back to the comfort of their homes, a tourist has no place there. In Sydney the evenings make me think of when I first arrived. I wandered, explored and forged friendships when I was alone. Evenings were both a sanctuary and a space of longing. Swollen with possibility, the hope, the wonder of what the night might bring, but calm and empty as it ended.

Evening reminds me that I’m alone, but that we’re all in here together.

Listening out my window I hear trains running between houses, buses rushing past, and people pounding the pavement to get home before it’s dark. On the street I see buildings lit up, and think, if one window is one person, around me there are thousands. Too many, perhaps. At dusk the city is noisy, its heart beats fast. It’s when everyone is here together, moving. Just imagine a map of the city in live time, all of the trains, the cars, the footpaths and the ferries, all of the people looking out the window, looking at their phones, calling a friend abroad. All at once, together.

It reminds me how small we are, in this powerful world.

As one day closes, and the sun disappears beyond the horizon out west, I can’t help but think of that place beyond, where the sun is just rising for the day, a new world awaits. I think of our lives, existing simultaneously, yet time, and light, and days apart.

I love being out at dusk. It’s different from the sunrise hour, when everything is quiet. At dusk the world is wide awake, it’s pulsing, and it’s alive.

At dusk, I feel alive, too.