Single Women talking on the phone at 1 AM while Men walk their dogs and I edify unentangled

"People can be cruel," she said into the phone on the doorstep at one AM. "Men! I wish I didn't need the wankers. I think about it long and hard, but it's only ever limp. Just my luck."

How embarrassing to walk past at this intimate detail. In the shit perfumed lightfall of the street I can see that she is tall even though she is sitting, and blond. Her painted toenails turtle out of jelly sandals. Her voice is coldly metallic in the cave of this street, and I wonder if this is just a guard mechanism devised by her larynx because a man in ratty clothes and a mask is pouring heavy footsteps up the sidewalk right in front of her.

Then she laughs.

The night is broken by barking and lonely laughter. Fools whistle and vanish, a breeze flutters open windowdrapes and the impervious tyranny of the night forces all past and present time to seem indistinct. Painfully the same.

The old need slips in at the whisper of pagan shadow gods. I am a low animal. Condoms strewn across the charged and tranquil path that leads to a million hideaway avenues of quick-escape release and despair. Like cherry blossoms, the cast off flowers of a fruit that never was.

Lonely and wanting, men take to the streets dressed for bed because all across this city dogs scratch against doors and beg to go out. "Honey, go," their drowsy females say, and so they go, ripping open the covers into the foggy night air, deluding themselves that when they return a warm body will envelop them in thanks. The dogs race around the roadside, forgetting everything but the onslaught of panic smells, and seeing in every clearing a promise.

If it's empty, you can relieve yourself on it. That's the rule. That's their nature. Ours too. Broken glass and strewn flyers crunch beneath my feet as I march solemn past this spectacle. Grown men in their pajamas shouting "Here Poochy Poochy Poochy! Come here Muffin! Thaassa good boy!" in the middle of the night, picking up plastic handfuls of a lesser beings refuse and slowing dying.

What awaits us at the end of our nights? Women dream of men, careless and dark. Men dream of filling her skin and teasing her body with their hands, and though imperious sometimes this works out. But most of the time it all sinks into disappointment. Twisted, dissolute, and disappearing. That's why I'm out walking tonight.

I put on the mask, telling myself I could vanish into the soundless dark, but the glass crunches beneath my feet and the whole unbroken delusion of the world remains, pressing against my head like an unwanted black conviction of my own malignant misjudgments of the world. And yet I walk on. The future is a bright light around the corner. Soon late night conversations about assholes will diminish. Dogs will empty last bowels, men will acquit themselves to the reality of not getting anything tonight, and then will come dawn. Truth lies in silence, in emptiness, and in isolation. That's where it all begins.

When I get there, maybe then I'll take off my mask.