Night Owl

I’d always like to think of myself as night owl; a I stay up later, I don’t need as much sleep as a regular couch potater, type of fellow. You’ll get strange looks though, when you start to share your late night experiences with others, even if they are for the best part unequivocally mundane. A light midnight jog for example, with that rain that keeps you switched on and alert, ready for that fourth slippery step as you glide down on to the footpath that takes you under the bridge.

Owls are predators.

It’s the experience I’m hunting, I’m not looking for a hunt to experience per say, but perhaps that would be less mundane than most evening explorations. So when the scream coincided with the weightlessness of the wet step it was quite the awakening moment!

Did we stumble into the hunt?

A wave of ‘what ifs’ flooded my thoughts, briefly dulling the sensation creeping up my ankle and leg that would in turn tell me I’d at least sprained if not broken it in the slip. It was like I had been attacked, how rude, how could one incident possibly 200 meters away have also affected me such. I searched past the bridge feebly limping along trying to make out any sign of figures across the park.

A macabre joke came to mind, my father quoting comically across the morning news reporter to my younger self “they wanna start investigating these joggers, they always find the bodies”. What if I had entered tomorrow mornings news scene, would I, could I find a body?

Images formed and quickly dissolved once I’d gotten closer to the shadow and shape of the grass. This was it, this was the story to tell. But what if I came across the suspect, I’d be no match for them with a useless ankle. Maybe it was just a sprain. I was certainly covering some ground hungry for excitement, a vulture looking for abandoned carnage. Then a twinge, my mind not focused on the task at hand fell victim to the dull pain underneath the adrenaline. Fool. I continued on to find the source of that scream.

I couldn’t in the end. The park was indeed empty and it was quite the effort to climb the steps on the way back to my flat. It had clearly been a pointless scream. The morning news showed no sign, no bits to camera that would later end up on the next big crime documentary. I was gutted.

Maybe I don’t have that killer instinct after all, everyone likes to think they have I suppose, or rather it’s just the morbid curiosity. To have been involved in a murder would have been brilliant. Not to participate I realised, or even to witness it, but to have heard the scream. Well that’s something that would have got me on the documentary. Sat there under the lights while the cameras adjust and check the focus. Waiting to give my mysterious information.

But I wasn’t, I was sat, over-tired on the tube making an effort to count the stations passing to both keep me awake and on time for work. Thinking over the evenings events, my eyes caught with the imagination of the events. I studied the passengers deciding which of them was the cause of my painful ankle. Most looked as tired as I. Fellow night owls.

That’s when I realised most of us night owls are grossly overreaching. We might stay up late, watch too much tele, read too much online and sometimes even go for jogs in the rain. But compared to an actual barn owl that not only stays up all night, actually lives for the kill and murders mice on a nightly basis, we are but dreamers chasing ideas when we should in fact be catching up on sleep. I then pictured us all as owls crammed into the tube. I chuckled to myself awkwardly which drew the attention of some eyes. My prime suspects.