City Lights

Standing on the hill looking out over the city lights stretching to the east and to the west and the south. No, I was sitting and I was drinking a beer and people were coming and going before me, opening and closing the sliding glass door and there was some commotion about getting the amplifiers plugged into a different socket so the band could play without blowing the breaker. I was sitting and the city lights stretched out below me down the hill out across a thousand intersecting biways and hiways and dark spots where there were no lights and so many millions of people doing their thing on a wild Saturday night. Some sleeping, some going to bed early with thoughts of Saturday night possibilities forgone, some revving up to a let-go and blow give-it-all-out Saturday night to blow the steam off the work week and settle into the monotony just around the corner. But nobody thinks of Monday morning on Saturday night, no, they reserve that worry for Sunday. Saturday night is free and the heathens roam the night, straight, upright people who just gotta get it all out once or twice a week or they might blow their top on Wednesday at three in the afternoon. I was sitting, drinking a beer, watching family and family friends I don't know run about and dance and retrieve drinks from the bar downstairs. I was somewhere in between the wild Saturday night and the early quit, the Saturday night resignation hopeful for a calm and whole Sunday sliding easy into the week. I was just sitting, looking out across the city with downtown in the distance and the black space of the river breaking east and west. Looking out across eternity and the castles of man's building and thinking about a girl and what she might be doing on a cooling Saturday night sliding now slowly into Fall. I imagined her smile and knew I could feel her out there somewhere. Out over the hills, in the suburbs to the west? Or was she already downtown laughing and enjoying the lights and flash and open possibility of the night? I knew I wasn't with her, no, I was just sitting drinking my beer and thinking but the stretching expanse of the city before me, endless sprawling out into the dark where I couldn't see the lights anymore, indicated her simple individual existence. A million people below me, mad, unique, interesting characters, all blended into one, a general statement of life now in this modern way, but her, she stood as a beacon of light, alone, indicating some great energy and the rising vibration of possibility and excitement and beauty.