The plan, if there was such a thing, was simple. Escape.

The indoors, usually as snug and comforting as old sweater, tonight felt tight and close, even constricting. Really it made me squirm. But to venture directly out into the darkness? I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I never do. I am always afraid. And yet tonight somehow I jam my feet into my sneakers, tie them tightly, and shut the door tightly behind me.

I am doing this.

It being nighttime I expect murky blackness but instead find myself surrounded by a warm dark brownish glow, a darkness which has a sparkly, an almost shimmery quality that seems to catch reflected light and hold it tentatively aloft. In the distance I can hear the muscular hum of the highway traffic cutting through the air. Peering over the railing I can see them, the cars racing like fierce, double-eyed dragons on the attack. I love seeing them cutting, slicing through the night air!

And so I walk onward. I know my legs are stiff, i know my pace awkward. But I manage. I am not used to this. The sidewalks beneath my feet feel blocky and uneven, massed stones immobile and frozen in concrete, lain square to square. Shyly, I still avoid the cracks.

The nighttime houses are neatly buttoned up, lights glowing from within. Some are stacked like layer cakes, the attic windows warmly lit as birthday candles on top the fondant. Others are neatly wrapped packages, cared for and caressed. I stop for just a moment to smell the roses, embraced by the darkness, pink and roundly ripe. One furtive sniff and I am undone. but a glance at the the hedges as they stand crisp and erect, bordered by proud purple iris dancing tremblingly in the darkness restores me.

My flashlight bobs insinuatingly like a flickering, glinting lantern, I am a modern-day watchman, keeper of the nighttime safety. At least that is how I’d like to think of myself. So when the scent shocks and envelops me, a combination of hydrangeas reaching toward the sky and s’mores cooling from the grills, I nearly swoon.

But I righten myself. Out here there is no one to question me. No one to bother me. No one to make fun of me. I can be foolish or bold it doesn’t matter. There is a delicious joy in for once no one knowing exactly where I am, what I am thinking, what I am doing.

Hedges loom. Trees lurk.

And yet? This is impractical walking. Why walk with no real purpose? Why walk when no one knows precisely where I am ? Simply because the world is full of secrets and full of pleasures to know. I can be a part of it.

After an hour my legs are loosened, my steps l   lengthening, my mind relaxing. I can remember. I can think. Out here in the world. A nighttime walk.

I am, just for a moment, suffused with sensation.

It is enough. And now at last, I am home.