running with ghosts

The two clocks in my apartment steadily tick and talk away increments of time, debating the finer points in low, measured voices, but ultimately agreeing on a singular truth. As I listen the dialogue crescendos and fades, the cadence shifts ever so slightly then pauses to emphasize a point, but I know that's just my own second-to-second take on reality.

Strange how that small tock can become deafening in a silent room when you lie in bed. I used to have to take the battery out of my clock at night in high school to fall asleep. Though I never really wanted to fall asleep yet anyway.

Why- why am I so deeply, so fiercely in love with this time of night? The early a.m. hours draw a serene veil of dark, electric mystery/possibility over the slumbering earth, all of its appointments suspended, its anxieties forgotten. This is a time for creativity, a time for solitude and introspection, a time to step outside and run with ghosts. Only a few other living souls roam about- though you seldom see a face you'll hear them driving down the highway, engaged in secret agendas, destinations unknown.

Mind ablaze you set out alone to jog through the still suburban backstreets, down the deserted bike paths and into the inky bamboo forest that exists for only a few unobserved hours each day. Focusing on the rhythm of your breath, suddenly a twig snaps loudly in the darkness to your left and squeezes a trigger deep in your brainstem, surging an involuntary shotgun blast of adrenaline through your blood that simultaneously shuts down the capacity for abstract thought and inverts all your instincts to Prey like the broad edge of a finger flipping off a row of light switches. Other nocturnal animals greet your newly sharpened senses; hidden jungle creatures that holler challenges from the treetops as you pass; dogs hoarsely asserting their respective jurisdictions in the distance; roosters who cry a siren's herald for the imminent dawn.

Through swirling clouds of breath I glimpsed a small Buddhist graveyard crowning a hill to the left, nestled against the crouching skeleton of an empty greenhouse. So I climbed up to sit among the polished marble and granite monuments, crafted with the harsh elegance of simple geometric figures, all angles and planes carved from smooth stone that gleams with a modest, understated luster in the faint moonlight, providing sanctuary for the spirits and earthly remains produced by generations of the same bloodline.

And I found a spot that felt right and sat there for a long time- clearing my head, listening to the wind combing the ricefields and the distant roar of the superhighway, jarred by the rooster crowing again and again- thinking about graves and my future and the last time I watched the sun rise, considering what it would feel like to become a ghost.