it's 2:41 and as I stop outside the wet steps to my apartment I hear birds chirping. are city birds always awake, nocturnal, circadian cycles skewed also, I wonder? I don't know. the city indicates itself only as a glow, a smooth gradient from white haze to darker haze. it's either 2:41am or maybe it's actually minutes before sunrise, and it feels like the morning before a flight, when everyone seems asleep and gone from your life and in the end it's just you with bags packed going towards this other place, and no amount of words will prepare you for that familiar transit sequence of departures, taxis, buses, cabs, overhead intercoms, that familiar shuffle of bustle, someone else's workday, someone else's dreaded commute, someone else's excited jaunt, someone else's life-changing passage.