When the City Slept

One day, I was tired and suffering from a mild heat stroke, so I slept at 6 PM.

I woke up around midnight. I had recovered from both the exhaustion and the heat stroke, and I was feeling really good — the way we do when we bounce back from a sickness. Now that I was done with the heat stroke, it felt cool. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t thirsty.

It was peaceful. Nobody was visiting me. Amazon wasn’t knocking on my door. Nobody was calling. Everyone else in the building — and the city — was asleep. I had the world to myself.

I didn’t have any work to do. No cooking. No need to go out. My to-dos didn’t even matter in that state of mind. They could wait for tomorrow. I was just chilling watching quiet, contemplative Youtube videos that gently drew me in, rather than ticking off a list.

The lights in the apartment were all off. I left them off, and walked around, admiring the city lights seeping in through the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking half a kilometer of open space from the 7th floor. The city lights cast a faint shadow of the balcony handrail on the far wall. They gently lit my house with muted colors. The only lights indoors were from my receiver, TV, and Wifi router… My senses weren’t assaulted the way they are in the day. My eyes found it comfortably dark. My ears found it comfortably silent. My skin found it comfortably cool.

It felt like another world, a kinder, gentler one.