Dawn...

We all have at some point in our lives stayed up all night. We all have also watched the sunrise. Each of these experiences is always memorable in some way. As if by going against our ingrained or hardwired habits, like sleep… we somehow embed the rarity of the occurrence deep in our minds.

Do not read on, if you are in search of an entertaining tale of humor and satire, or a dark and mesmerizing night. This is just me, writing about something I once encountered… and enjoyed.

Living alone in the big city, can be compared to… being given the key to the playboy mansion, more than anything else. Everything that you had ever dreamed of doing now becomes magically possible. You only need to make sure that not the faintest rumors of your escapades reach your rabbit eared parents… because that would be the equivalent of waking up from the American dream.

When I started my solitary life in the sea of opportunity, I regret to say that I failed to take immediate advantage of my situation. I will not claim that I intended to uphold the expectations that ‘people’ had of me… I just didn’t know how to begin… so I didn’t.

I still continued living the life of a typical teenager. The drinks still had to be consumed in overpriced bars; all the dates were still in crowded restaurants or malls; movie theatres were still one of the scarce places to make-out; and I returned home every night as if the curfew was still being enforced.

Of course each of these things should have (and eventually did) changed for better alternatives.

Gradually though I dipped my toes in the waves lapping the shores of the said sea… and before I knew it, I was riding the waves.

Arguably the second best thing about having your own place is the huge reduction in your expenditure. Bottles of alcohol cost much less than glasses. The best part of course is the freedom of being able to choose when to be at your domain, not to be there at all or decide who gets to be there with you….

The events of one night stand out in my memories more sharply than most. This in itself is a surprise considering how hazy this particular recollection ought to be....

Some form of event was to be held at college and was scheduled to get over quite late. Late enough for many of my batch mates to request a nightcap. Having the luxury to choose my guests, I was more than happy to accommodate no fewer than seven for the night.

At any gathering of college students, alcohol has a way of showing up. No one needs to plan buying the booze; it just appears when you need it. With eight of us… it certainly showed up in style… enough to form a small bar on my table.

It took us all three hours to finish the entire stock. The seasoned drinkers, the novices and even the downright cowards, afraid to drink… all managed to get themselves high and were rolled into bed (separate ones… mostly) by me. I just couldn’t sleep… or pass out.

So I stayed awake in a chair by the window, watching the stars and the sky….

The steady snoring of inebriated peers and the sighing of the breeze were in perfect sync… weird as it may sound. The street lamps were all off and the only light illuminating the night of my drunken rapture was that of the moon.

I must have stayed there, sitting by the window, my hair gently ruffled by the never ceasing wind, sightless yet unblinking for a really long time. Some magnetic, hypnotic force held me there, and I was powerless to even turn away for a single second.

Not a single living creature was to be seen in the streets. The lights were out in every building including my own, the feeling of desolation was complete. The only things that kept my unsteady mind from assuming that the world I was seeing was post apocalyptic… were the snores of the seven somewhere behind me. The only sound in the world that reached my ears….

I still couldn’t sleep. I watched as the night remained changeless for what appeared to be an eternity. I felt the cool touch of the draft caress my skin for what seemed to be the millionth time… and all through I sat still and unmoving like a statue.

I rested there, enjoying the solitude and the calmness after a most hectic day and taxing evening. The sensation that a mixture of alcohol and the cool night wind had produced in me, washing away my exhaustion more effectively than eight hours of sleep.

I watched as the east began to brighten… faintly and slowly… as if the dawn was scared of destroying the resting shade of the blessed night.

I watched as the horizon grew lighter… shade by shade with time. From the inky dark it had been minutes ago it turned to pale and ashen.

The play of colors on the canvas of the sky then spread across the heavens at a rapid rate, wiping out the stars one at a time, snuffing each one out… black turned to blue and finally gray as the metamorphosis was completed… for a while.

A single point of light still refused to die out. When all the others had been consumed it seemed to glow brighter than ever… it outlasted the moon as even that slowly faded away.

The east began to change color again. Grey was replaced with a tinge of red. A narrow horizontal band… a little way above the edge. The band grew in width, the sides still red… the centre lightening to orange and then yellow… slowly approaching the shade of the bright colorless eyesore that would last the cloudless October day.

The sun was still absent… and the lone survivor of the night sky still remained.

I waited for the sun to rise… impatiently. The sky kept growing brighter all the while. At one point I felt sure that somehow I had missed the sun’s rise from the horizon… surely it had to be pretty high in the sky by now for it to get this bright.

I checked… it was still not there… I returned my gaze to the east.

At last two overdue things happened at once. The last remaining speck of the night’s reign was finally extinguished… and in that same moment the sun crowned… a red sphere… huge and shimmering in the early morning light.

Rapidly it ascended into the blue, changing in color and brightness as it rose. Quickly… as if attempting to make up for the delay it had made to the start of the day… as if apologizing to me for my long wait. Red … to orange… to yellow… finally to the ball of flames that could not be described in terms of its color… only by its intensity….

The first few people were beginning to rise from their slumber… the hour belonging solely to the really late sleepers and the really early risers. Their day was beginning with the sunrise… mine was at its end.

I finally fell asleep… with a single sigh of contentment that I had captured everything of the night… and its merger with the day.