The Scrivener's Jest

They say the night shift kills you slowly.

Gods, I miss it.

I miss the midnight, the empty offices, and the silence. The world abandoned save for the few, the ghosts. We haunted the backrooms and the alleyways, eschewed the clubs and bars where the remnants of the living clung to the bright lights of day. We did our work, invisible to everyone else; and as the sun, we faded away.

Perfection.

I did a lot of night work in my younger days. I was a delivery driver, security officer, data center tech. I even had a gig as an overnight hotel worker which meant I did a little of everything from cleaning, to security, to driving the hotel transport, to running odd things to rooms in the middle of the night.

It becomes a world unto itself, and that is the crux of the problem. The death the night shift brings is not in the work but in the dissonance. I never wanted to come back. I wanted to stay in the night, but the realities of our world require the day. Thus, torn between two worlds, we dissolve.

This unfortunate reality, a lesson, in so many ways.