It is a soft wind that flies past my frame, stirring every lick of fabric, carrying it away from my body, allowing the chill to touch my skin. It totes the thought of a fire in a small home, moving through my hair, the pores on my skin, the hair on my arms, inviting me into its warm grip. There is a slight chill, yet it soothes and calms, like a mother’s breath against a baby’s face. A dog barks off in the distance, alarming the world that it has made a discovery. The sound of the bark draws my eyes towards a setting sun, tinting the sky with its purple hue.

As humans, we wish that we could crawl back into our mother’s grip and be held and coddled until we feel like we’re ready to go face the world again. It’s a significant trend in not just humans, but all natural elements. Things always linger just a moment longer than needed in order to savor that last moment. Watch a raindrop at the tip of a blade of grass: it lingers for as long as the blade allows, delaying its death. The blade of grass, however, offers no shelter, and the raindrop eventually drops those last few centimeters to its death. Even a raindrop recognizes the loss that comes with dying; maybe it wasn’t quite ready to watch the world end.

As the raindrop slips from my mind so easily, it stumbles onto another peculiar thought; a tiny spider hangs suspended from its web, a web so unimaginably large, there is no way that single spider could have created it on its own. I notice the soft droplets of water, hanging in the web, grateful to be spared from their friend’s fates by the sticky thread. The spider sits solemnly, waiting for its next meal to be foolish enough to fly into its trap. My gaze follows the strands of the web, and I notice, that although the web is so large and striking, it is only held up by two strings, both connecting to two tree branches opposite to each other in the middle of a sidewalk, completely in reach of any passerby. I silently laugh at the spider, for being so foolish as to not consider how easily its home could be knocked down by any small element, yet I sympathize with her, as I know the disappointment she will feel when her proud work has been torn apart.

While waiting for the inevitable destruction of the poor arachnids home, I decide to inspect the creature a bit further. She is exceptionally small, but very round and dark. Eight short, thick legs plunge out of her deep black core, moving quickly across her web, trampling the raindrops, crushing their hope of survival, turning them into teardrops. Sure enough, after only minutes of waiting, a stranger passes through the sidewalk and breaks off connection between the thin wire connected to the tree branch and the web. The spider scrambles up the web, her little legs successfully carry her to the top and the rest of the way to the branch. I watch as the spider rests upon the tree branch, until my eyes grow tired and begin to wander. By the time I look back, the spider has gone, or my eyes have become unaccustomed to the fine tuning of watching her, and she only fades into the background.

I am reawakened to the late afternoon by the sound of birds chirping, airborne planes drifting past. It occurs to me that in this world, we are all very lonely. If not so, then we would not need to find the need for entertainment. Even alone, one finds a need to entertain oneself. Are we not our own best friends? Doesn’t that count as some level of neediness or desire to be accepted? Nobody is so independent as to not need anybody at all, not even themselves. We are all born lonely; we are all born with an innocent, an unexplainable desire to love ourselves. It is when you don’t love yourself that you feel at your loneliest, and no matter how much company you gain, and how many distractions you attain, that empty void inside of you only grows substantially larger, and eventually begins to be filled with resentment towards those who distract you.

It is not so often that I sit on a bench, watching the day come to an end with such a calm, delighted view of the world. There comes a very nice feeling of a lack of care of all the troubles around when you are by yourself; when there is nobody bringing up the troubles of your past, no reminders of your faults, your mistakes. No desire to change things, to fix things, to move or to think. To hear and to see and to breathe are the only things on your mind. It is the flickering of the street lamp that brings me out of my trance, signaling the final fall of night. It is the lights behind windows that cast a gleam upon the street, casting a shadow of a ghost across the asphalt. It is the damp on my shoes and my hair and my face, that awakens me to how long I have been, like a statue, fixed to this bench. It is the replacement of the sun by the moon, from a bright and blindingly beautiful shine, to a soft, brilliant velvety glow. It is the change in the wind, no longer welcoming but bone chilling, hair raising and taunting in its willful whispers. It no longer carries the thought of a warm fire, but instead harbors a feeling of a dead man’s damp breath across your face and down your spine in bed at night. It is, strangely, a very nice feeling.

A feeling that inspires the mind to do a bit of things that can be done, only under the shadow of the night. Things that nobody needs to know about, except for the wind.