The whole city is quiet in the mornings. I like it here then, when the light is gold, and the air isn’t as suffocating as it will be later in the day. It’s a different city then, there are different lives, depending where you go, at what time.
In the early mornings, before the sun is fully awake, it’s a city of oddities. People who work nights heading home for dinner with the dawn. Mothers with only a few minutes to themselves in a day crush the pavement under their sneakers before heading home to make breakfasts and lunches and dinners and homes. Delivery trucks crawl through the streets, stopping to deposit goods, restocking stores. Diners are starting to open up, releasing coffee and bacon smells into the air. Truck drivers, cab drivers, people whose time is governed by the road, and and not the sun are eating their breakfasts, lunches, dinners. Diner food. Pancakes with syrup from color coded bottles that are never unsticky. Strong coffee in blue and white mugs. Formica tables, lined with silver, and motherly waitresses with their names across their chests.
Night people, like me, are going to wherever they disappear to for the day. Into shopping malls, and apartments with chipped paint and curling posters covering water stains. To libraries, and bus stations, following the shadows.
In a little while teachers and bus drivers will start seeping into schools to open things up for the day. Then come children, to meet their buses and be carted off to their jobs for the day. Businessmen and women go off in their responsible suits, and responsible haircuts, and responsible cars to their responsible lives.
I used to spend a lot of time sitting in coffee shops all night, waiting for this to happen, to watch the shift change from night people to day people. I think the morning I wrote this I was sitting on a third story fire escape and it was very sunny and people's shadows were very long.