There is a walk that happens in the hinge of the night, in that hour when the world is not yet itself. It is a walk made in the rain before dawn, an unpleasant immersion into a reality that is already dissolving.
The city is a ghost of itself. Streetlights bleed halos of gold into the wet black, painting the pavement with a liquid, trembling fire. What is solid, a wall, a railing, a car, they become a suggestion, their edges softened by the steady whisper of the rain. The sound is a blanket, a constant, soothing static that muffles the distant, sleeping world. In this cocoon of sound and mist, I am only witness.
I am not here to document the street, the hour, the weather. I am here to document the feeling of it. The cold painful sting of the droplets on my exposed skin. The expanding solitude that feels less like loneliness and more like possession.
This is not a dead city. It is a city dreaming. The rain is the dream, washing away the certainty of day, blurring the lines between what is and what could be. A shape in a window is a story untold. A pair of headlights cutting the gloom is a comet passing through a private universe. The dawn is coming, inevitably, to reclaim the shapes and restore the names of things. But for now, in this precious, liquid dark, the world is only what I feel it to be.
