At night…and at dawn

walking in the city

Hirota, when its grey shutter rolls up hours later, will be a pastry shop.

Dawn is an awkward interregnum between the hilarity of the night and daylight hours filled with precise errands. Before day officially begins, the trash will be picked up and the streets brushed clean.The people out at dawn will then disappear, if only into the congested mass of pedestrians. They will shed the awkwardness of dawn in which they stand out, as solitaries or members of mysterious association, and become ordinary, hardly meriting a second glance.

It is three hours before the crowds of commuters arrive for work. The people here, by virtue of the hour, are solitaries, if only by accident. The emptiness of the dawn street collects around them.

The walkers at dawn are without the comfort of others around them.There are few things to distract themselves with, since businesses are not open, and store windows are darkened. It is not good to be preoccupied, as the promises or despairs of the day to come seem to hang about in the air with too much nakedness. It is best to walk, a stranger in thought and reality, to a familiar destination that will restore oneself to oneself.

At 5 AM there are still a few inhabitants of the night out on the street. Their “work day” is coming to an end, with perhaps one last assignation. They are calculating and sober,  unlike the person who deposited a bottle of wine and a four dollar umbrella on the sidewalk, who is by now sleeping in some bed.