In the early hours.

Hush your chatter, young lady. You find yourself here sometimes, and admit it, you kinda enjoy it. These random occasional nights bring you back to those months of insomnia and midnight conversations.
The weight of heavy weariness pressing against your forehead. the restless shivers travelling along your fingers and legs. The pain behind your eyelids with every slow blink. The way your bed's soft comfortable folds feel like a prison. The way you can't avoid watching the slow sliding of minutes from one to the next. So slow.
The thoughts that run in dizzying circles round and round in your head. Memory after worry after wish after sorrow after memory. A flashing merry-go-round with music that repeats itself over and over, refusing to give you any rest.
Your body and head are heavy with desire for sleep.
All of this you recognize. Like an old friend. There is some strange comfort in it's familiarity. You recognise how you'd be if you allowed yourself. Up in the early hours, ink on your fingers or paint under you nails, obsessive in your desire to escape the throbbing, unavoidable irritation of inability to sleep. Or pacing the floors of the silent, cold house, listening to every creak, alert to every sound. But that habit is one too easy to slip into.
Oh, stop this inane chatter. God give me rest.

Visited.

When the barks first crack through the window of sleep, they sound like screams. Short and high pitched, screams of pain or terror. They slip into your dreams and confuse your sleep-befuddled brain, and then suddenly you're sitting upright, swearing, heart thudding, your ears straining for the direction of the sound- who..? But once you're awake, the realization is almost instantaneous. Because with open eyes comes a clarity.

This wasn't the first time I'd heard a fox bark. But never this close. I lean from the warmth of my bed and reach to open my skylight. The cold sweeps in from the street outside, and there it is, standing alert in the middle of the road just outside my house. Tail raised, it’s neck stretched with each high bark. It looks incredible. I cough as the night air tickles my throat, and, momentarily, it looks up at me. I have eye contact with a fox. Then it looks away, I am no threat, and it continues barking. Calling? I don’t know. For a full ten minutes I sit there, my duvet drawn about my shoulders, my skin rough from the cold, and watch it. My sister’s skylight next to mine opens, and we discuss the wild animal below us in whispers. It pays no attention to our speculating.
Suddenly it is joined by a second. Smaller and more fragile looking than the first, this fox wanders from the mouth of our road down to the pavement outside our neighbours house, and lies down. The first fox stops it’s barking. Walks up to a couple of meters away from it, lies down. They whine at each other, quietly, hardly noticeable. Then the first fox gets up, moves a meter closer, and lies down again. He repeats this til they are close, and both hidden behind the neighbour’s car. Ten seconds later, the second fox emerges and goes to sit in the middle of the road outside our house. The first fox departs. And the second restarts the barking.
I sit, shivering slightly, watching this strange event. My sister’s skylight closes, but I sit still and silent until, without due warning, the fox ups and leaves. A swish of the tail as she turns a quick circle, and then pads off down the road. I close my skylight with a clunk, and snuggle back down into the duvet, curling up small to try and make the most of the limited area of warmth. That night my dreams are followed by a small red fox. Tail raised high.

Night drive.

It's like flying. In the dark, the lights speed past me like a stream of living stars. Between the warmth of two bodies, staring with wide eyes at the night in front of us, I pull my knees up under my chin and watch with wonder in my eyes at the misapplied beauty of the highway. In front of me, pairs of red lights scatter and skip. Like the eyes of some strange beasts, they back away as we advance. We follow them and weave between them as though we are one of them.
In my pocket of soothing music I feel as though I no longer exist. With my view between the seats and the images rushing towards me, and the movement I can feel through the windows on either side, the sensation of motion is enough to pull me from my body and deposit me in a place of sound and sensation that lulls me into a wide-eyed sleep. I sit with my arms wrapped around my legs, and rest my chin on my knees. Even as I relax, still and quiet, I am tearing through the night with the stars.

And the only thing that keeps me from flying off with the tide of lights is the flickering movement that jumps to catch my attention as my companions shift and move and shuffle next to me.