Thursday, October 2, 2008

The Night Shift

Working the night shift does strange things to your brain. It's not that the world is a different place when it's dark out (I can't even see outside right now), it's more about the vague feeling you get that you are the only one awake in the world, the only person who isn't fast asleep in their comfortable beds. It's as if you are the only one minding the store while the rest of the world gets some shut eye. Keeping watch over the world until the dark has passed. And while thoughts like that may invoke feelings of loneliness and separation, they can also be strangely liberating and exciting. Like our fantasies of being left alone in a department store after closing, or being the last human alive after a worldwide catastrophe, the idea that we are alone - that we can do or say anything without being seen or heard - are as basic and profound as the first time our parents left us home alone for the night. And as the hours and minutes take us closer and closer to the light, we cling to those moments of freedom and solitude - reminders of a world in which we were in control.

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