The night is dark and tender, charcoal and purple, a quiet canvas stretched wide across the sky, where pinpricks of light twinkle and gleam in the black velvet expanse, distant and steady.

The warm weight of a little head rests on my lap, growing heavier by the minute, surrendering slowly to sleep. Lashes droop and flutter against a pale cheek, breath deepening, the small body softening into stillness.

Time seems to pause here.

A cloud drifts across.

Dense.

Grey.

Opaque.

And then, strangely, it shifts.

It darkens into something deeper, tinged with a colour that feels almost like old blood, heavy and unsettling against the softness of the night.

Odd.

The glare from the city lights, perhaps.

Or the pall of dust left behind by a long, dry day.

And yet, the garden below remains pitch black, the trees reduced to shadow and silence, making this moment of inversion—this sudden change in colour and tone—quietly disconcerting.

Lonely.

The warmth of the child on my lap, steady and real, anchors me, even as something colder stirs beneath it, a slow sinking in the heart that has nothing to do with the night air.

We come into this world alone.

We say this often, almost casually, as though repetition dulls its truth.

Sometimes we form deep human connections that hold us, shape us, give us meaning.

Sometimes we do not.

But either way, there are moments—intense, unguarded moments—when the void opens up, wide and silent, and we become aware of it in a way that is impossible to ignore.

And in those moments, we stand before it alone.

We gaze into it.

And it gazes back.

On the final journey too, we are alone.

The thought lingers, heavy and vast, stretching beyond language, beyond comfort.

The air thickens, carrying the fragrance of night blooms, sweet and heady, almost too much in the stillness.

And mosquitoes.

Persistent.

Unrelenting.

Their faint whine threads through the quiet, their sharp little stings breaking through the reverie with surprising authority.

I snap out of it.

Startled.

Grounded.

Never underestimate the power of mosquitoes—their ability to pull you back from the edge, from abstraction into the immediate, the practical, the now.

I shift, careful not to wake him, and lift the precious little fellow from my lap, holding him close as I carry him inside, each step deliberate, each movement gentle.

I tuck him into bed.

Straighten the sheet.

Watch for a moment as his breathing settles again.

That yawning, dreadful moment—the one that opened and beckoned—has receded.

For now.