Keeping the Night Light On

 We are as two ships wandering the seas in the middle of the night. He, chasing after Morpheus, me waiting for the daylight to reach out and grab hold.

And so it was last evening, as with many before, that we bumped into each other online. While the universe slumbered, we intersected. My new day having commenced at 2:30 AM, his old one only finishing nearly two and a half hours later than that.

My eccentricity a product of age and bladder, his proclivity formed by a career in an industry that demands nocturnal attention.

We are as different as our time zones. He never having met a four letter word he couldn't use as the focal point of a sentence, me trying endlessly to craft phrases like those you have now just wandered into. He wickedly entertaining, me even boring myself as I tell tales that lead nowhere in particular. His beard prolific, my facial hair insultingly inefficient.

And yet here we are the best of friends decades in. Somehow even as we are as distinct as our sleeping habits, there is no one else I would rather exchange brain cells with while the rest of the world is silent and in rem. 

He is witty, though a little bizarre in our back and forth this night. I strain to keep up, for I am forever stuck in his wake in our conversations. He is natural and quick in his retorts. Me, a plodder in real life encounters. We are as the tortoise and the hare in our capacity. 

This morning, at an hour when the rest of the world had at last arisen, we spoke, challenging each other as to the least hours of unconsciousness the evening just past. He won with three to my four. This cannot be good for either of our odds to reach old age with many of our cognitive faculties still intact.

But this is our lot, to meet when the rest of the world is in pause mode, to compare notes, to make each other laugh, to rattle each other's cages a bit.

And then to move on as intersecting lines in parallel worlds. Both of us keeping our night light on.

ReplyForward