I like to take walks at night through the backroads. I take my iPod and play some song I’ve heard a million times before, there are no surprises in the chords anymore, and that’s okay: it’s just the elevator music. I confess I sing out loud, almost involuntarily and without recourse, because there’s nobody else around.

Daylight mirrors your existence; you can’t help but remember you’re alive everywhere you go: Pedestrians move out of your way, an intimate conversation dwindles while you pass, civilization carves out space for you.

Night, less courteous. You can look around, to be sure, but it seems that at any moment a ficus could take your place should the land-Lord decide that you’re a bad use of real estate at the corner of Forest and Cowper. Nothing bends for you after sundown.

Tonight I cross an intersection against a man in a grizzled gray beard. His pants are pleated in a dozen directions, and his fly is open. His red plaid shirt is pulled out through it like a rose blossoming from the unlikeliest of places, but it is well watered with amber…rain. His body bobs and swivels, his back is grossly arched and his head is down, and he looks like a scythe chopping lazily through a world that is of a much swampier consistency than mine, a jello to my smooth garlic aioli (no wonder he looks so tired). I can’t say he’s moving so much as being moved, frame by frame, a marvel of claymation. His arms shuffle to some beat but it’s not mine. He’s singing something but there’s no music playing. An original.

It seems a pure coincidence that he crosses at the crosswalk, and I think if there happened to be a mountain or a desert here, he would cross those instead.

Side by side in the dark. He doesn’t change a thing, his timbre and gaze and shuffle all metronomic: a true steward of nighttime callousness. I, on the other hand, have stopped singing in hot self-awareness. He cuts me nothing, but I’ve carved out his space, a scythe in deed if not form.

I don’t want him to hear me. I’m not sure he even knows I’m there, but I am embarrassed that the man with the blooming crotch will hear me, and in that moment I am only certain that one of us is crazy.