confessions of a winter hipster

There’s a moment, deep into the night, when the streets on my block run empty and quiet save for the fear-burdened rats who scurry between the garbage-scattered sidewalks. In the middle of the second largest city of North America, there is a time unlike any other when you can stand in the middle of the road and no cars will bother you for dozens of minutes at a time. You can exist as a human without a car in a space where cars violently take priority; like stepping into a world where the pedestrian was prioritized over the vehicle. A minuscule act of defiance against the swathes of land that are offered only for the machine to exist in, and for our frail bodies to merely cross. I love the feeling of presiding over the roads in these moments, a tree unmoved by the stream in the middle of a river. But this paradoxical place, so magical in its rural sensation within an overwhelmingly urban environment, only exists during the winter. As the nights get warmer and people come out from sundown to sunup, the once sacred environment, ever so silent, is now as bustling at night as it was during the day. The cars claim their space again. Even in their absence, the other pedestrians, as much love as I have for them, steal away the privacy from the quiet moment of disobedience. You’re no longer making a stand. You’re just standing where you shouldn’t be.