Night walks

I love rain. It makes sidewalks glisten in the city lights. It layers onto the air at first a veneer of dampness, then slowly infuses it with a haze that dithers the light and makes everything glow.

I took my usual, post-examwalk earlier, after sunset, around Chinatown, up toward the Lowes and caught the afterglow light across the Common. Had to wear my wool winter jacket because it was rainy and nippy, the kind of cold that was just enough to weave one's breath into wispy strands with every heave of the chest. Times like these, I wish I had smoked. Something about it seems appropriate for this damp, monotone cityscape all around me. I walked pass the new Ritz Carlton hotel restaurant, with its dimly lit mahogany interior and glass tables perched on top of glowing bands of marble, backlit to highlight bejeweled simplicities, while svelte people posed behind half-tinted mirrors as they drank cosmos and popped nuts into their mouths. Casual glamour. Tonight, the sidewalk along the strip of the Ritz caught my eyes; something about the concrete they use and the kind of sand that, at night, reflected light to create the starry constelations beneath my feet. On this night, when everything was wet, it more than glittered. A fine diamond dusting lit my way.

People in Chinatown always stare at me. Maybe because I stare back with the same glazed, overcast eyes. I don't know. Cooks from little restaurants the size of matchboxes tend to spill out onto sidewalks around 7:00 pm to steal smokes. I see them, but then again, I don't. Their gawkish looks and manners often fade into the muddy browns and reds of Chinatown, as nondescript as any one of those blinking neon signs and greasy windowfronts that line these streets. They hang around dumpsters, never too far away from those unmarked doors cracked ajar and held in place by an old newspaper, or a shoe. I follow the lights.