To Walk After Midnight

I want things I cannot articulate, laid out before me like a garden of red peppers, now barely seeds.

Walking in suburbia after midnight is walking in the land of cats and small beetles, open windows and blue lights of TV screens. The smell of honeysuckle by the creek. Darting insects under sandaled foot, the sidewalk white and winding under streetlights. I think of cities. I think of Paris in Autumn, the taste of apple pastries. I think of rain in a city I have never seen, the long fogs of Seattle. I think of London, I think of home. I walk through writer's block, I walk through excessive adjectives, I walk through damp grass from the day's thunderstorm and try to make it into a metaphor. I walk slowly, the lights of passing cars my only human contact. A cat eyes me warily from under a mini-van. The houses share walls, share street space, share small squares of grass before long lines of cars. We are jammed up on one another in the middle of nowhere, anchored by a suite of big box stores and a bus stop. I think of Oakland Avenue, of late night walks down 7th street. I think of Roehampton Lane and the stretch of darkness between the council houses and the sole shop open later than 8 pm. I think of other Natalies, other women to walk alone on late night streets and never make it home again.

I tell myself that it is OK to be tired, to crawl into bed with damp hair curling from the moist air, to write tomorrow. Tomorrow may be kinder, brighter. Tomorrow there may be bright red peppers to wash in the sunlight streaming in from the kitchen window.

"Dummy," I tell myself. It is tomorrow. It will be what I make it.