In the Midnight Hour

Boots, scuffed and muddy. Cold-air whips to the face.
I covered ground in a city that was not my own, but one I had frequented before...events unfolded swiftly throughout the night; all impossible to predict.

I let myself flow, wearing a bit of 2010 and a Stephanie I recall meeting before. She had been gone for a long while; remaining young and dwarfed in times of the past but coaxed out to greet her future self again for one night, given a chance to help her reset the clock.

Dancing within, like a priestess in a ceremony; heartbeat so tribal; writhing like a cobra to a flute. I lost the mechanics of my physical being and existed like water.

The universe seemed to sweep all fragments of me from all crevices and corners and put them together in the center; collected right where I stood.

And in the midnight hour, I didn't seem to recognise this existence but liked what it had to offer me once again. While paper lanterns carried wishes across a fresh sky, I bumped into my past there in the present, and wondered: had my future been there too?

And in the newborn days of January, my boots were still scuffed and muddy, cold-air whips still lashed at my face.

I stepped back into the city that had always been my own, washed the sticky remnants of 2010 away and stepped forward a little more polished, into 2011.