Morning Darkness

I sit looking out into the early morning darkness. A small section of sky is visible above the garage through the limbs of the stone pine tree. The firmament is a dark blue waiting for dawn. I just heard a neighbor's truck go past. There are not other sound outside this morning.

The morning darkness fills the city. I know that somewhere down town or on the strip their are lights and people going from casino to casino. This is a 24/7 city, it never sleeps; even in the predawn darkness there is gambling, CAT buses circling their routes, people getting up, making breakfast and going to work. Las Vegas never sleeps, it never shuts down, and it never stops.

Las Vegas is like a perpetual motion machine, it's rhythm changes and the pace slows, but it never stops moving. There is always something going on somewhere in the city. A person doesn't have to be lonely in his or her room. You can go out into the city and be lonely in a crowd.

The morning darkness seems to bring these thoughts to the front of my mind. The morning darkness will soon give way to first light, then to dawn and then the full daylight. However, loneliness isn't that easy to disperse especially in a city that remains active twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five or three hundred and sixty-six day of the year.

There is an old song that ask the eternal question: Where are all the lonely people? If they are in Vegas then they're probably somewhere in a crowd waiting in the early morning darkness for someone to scatter their loneliness.