Last left turn before the end of the night
Cruising the brick-layered walls of Boston, a starry night in the sky, Jazz flows through the drivers car and fills the distance between you and me. The lights outside dim and die and brighten again. Alive. There’s life out there, in the city. There’s that sense of adventure; of opportunity. And we are witnesses — silent ones at that, since mirrors of technology try to catch our glimpses, and the music surrounds our other senses — that words, voice, would damage that moment, would — somehow — make it real, and in this night, this particular night, the surrealism of the Boston scene is enough. It really feels like it.
A right turn brings us to another square and a left to another, the city caught on that idle moment, too late to go to sleep and yet to early to wake up. That fleeting time when moonlight touches all and yet the yellow in every streetlamp caresses the empty spots; a gliding touch. And the people, walking, stirring, smiling. We see couples gently touching their hands. We see newcomers striding through the streets, trying to get a familiar sense of where they came. A feeling I know since I’m one of them too. I see a passage of buildings and night and for a second I’m in other place, back at my origins. And the silhouettes match up as the drive goes on, and memory takes control of my expectations. Trees and people and billboards somehow are merging in the mind and things seems to coincide. Till they don’t, and the restaurant that promised to appear next doesn’t, and a bridge takes its place. And it’s fine, since I’m back to the seat, another hand over mine and the moving night of Boston outside the window, staying “Welcome back, we’re still here and here we’ll remain”.
Our souls arrive home, somehow bigger and grander, having just had dinner; inner souls filled of memories, of shadows; of the lights that now are off, of people going on parties, and drinks, and cigarettes; of the ideas of what next, the fears; of change, so much change to come.
We get up on the street, leaving the car, facing the house where we’ll sleep and leave our bags for one of the last times till you have to fly away, and we breathe for one second more the air, the mixture of oxygen with life. And we cross the street, not quite the same people that left this place a mere hours away, nor the ones that will go on before sleep, and will order a pizza and watch tv. For that moment, for that speckle of time in the history of our lives, we are we, trapped in the middle between before and after.
And on that night, that singular night, that’s all we can really ask for.
