This Cold Nocturnal Drifting

I won't leave work now until it is light next spring. A week of later shifts and the turning back of the clock next Sunday propels these evenings into darkness.

It was strange watching it get dark from the fourth floor of the call centre. A bright and cold day gave way to a softened sunset, all pink and purple hues. After the sun had gone, these hues turned darker; purples and violets, till finally everything was black outside apart from the street lamps and the lights from inside of buildings.
Roofs were angles of darkness, the hidden corners of chimneys and the now-invisible sea creeping on the edge of my consciousness.
The lift down to the ground floor in silence. The doors seemed to breathe when they opened.

Walking back was cold. I stopped to ring Emily from the phone box at the top of my road, the street lamps through the distorted glass fracturing and warping. The road curving up by St Anne's Well Park, a summer place, now abandoned in deep autumn.

Cold in the bedsit tonight too, though I have my window open, so I only have myself to blame. The cold is strangely pleasant. It feels like stars and deep rivers, and the cars that pass by on the roads are the sound of the hulls of great ships cutting through these icy waters.
Rumours of frost, implications of winter hovering what must be only a few degrees above zero.

I remember Emily in the twilight of Diglis Weir, in that strange night that rose from the river Severn and the hidden places of wastegrounds, and that path winding into the woods where I last walked in the autumn of 1998.
Another path lined by trees and lamps, darkness pushing in from the unseen fields on either side, kept safely behind wire fences.

There is a stillness here as we approach midnight, a suspension of everything. A satellite in a decaying orbit around a planet of sleep.
Falling to sleep, I'll sink through stars in winter nights, hanging in their harsh and immutable dominion like crow-gods in some disordered and forgotten mythology.

There are footsteps on the streets outside. Their clockwork rhythm suddenly fades.