THE NIGHT KNOWS

The night knows.

It knows what the day pretends not to have heard.

Windows close. The last streetlight fades a face reflected in the glass. Something remains lit. It is not the body. It is the thoughts that spent the entire day crouched in the corner, waiting for the house to empty.

That is when the writer approaches the page. Barefoot. His hands still stained by everything he carried throughout the day.

He does not arrive with answers. He arrives hungry.

During the day, we lie well. We hide fear behind crowded schedules, sadness behind elevator smiles, desire behind polite silence. We wear names, titles, surnames. We talk so much that we forget the sound of our own voice when there is no audience.

The night tears those clothes away.

Certain words are born only after midnight, when the body no longer has the strength to keep lying.

Darkness does not ask permission. It explains nothing. It stays. It waits.

And standing before it, the writer understands:

Shadow is not the enemy.

Some shadows guard what he has not yet found the courage to scream. Others hold memories that should have rotted long ago but refused to die. There is a shadow that bites. There is also a shadow that rocks you in its arms.

And then there is the shadow that picks up the pen.

The tip tears across the paper—the only sound in the entire house.

One word. Then another, dirtier than the first.

Silence gains flesh, bone, scent.

Writing is forcing into the world what has spent an entire lifetime without a mouth.

The writer invents nothing at three in the morning. He excavates.

It was already there, buried shallow, waiting for a night deep enough to be dug out with bare hands.

A blank page was never empty. It is crowded. With questions he swallowed in front of others. With ghosts he swore he had killed. With the part of himself that wears a muzzle and a collar during the day.

And there is something indecent about this encounter.

Once the pen touches the paper, there is no pretending anymore that he did not know.

The word exposes. The sentence betrays. The comma is a confession.

Writing is the most elegant way of tearing your own throat open in public.

The night knows the books that died halfway through. The letters torn apart before they were ever sealed. The desires that survived only disguised as metaphor. The three in the morning when he almost told the whole truth, then erased everything before sunrise like a thief.

Between the writer and the night, there is a blood pact neither of them ever signed:

she lends him silence;

he gives it back in flesh made of words.

she hides the shadow;

he has the courage to baptize it with his own name.

Dawn comes. The page remains. The night retreats behind the first light, as if it had never been there.

But something has changed hands forever.

A written shadow no longer belongs only to the darkness. It belongs to memory. It belongs to the word. It belongs to whoever had the stomach to descend that far and return alive.

And every time someone opens a blank page in the middle of the night, the night stays close.

Watching. Waiting. Knowing.

The night knows what we write when we swear no one is watching.

J. Kasra — All Rights Reserved