The Streetlight Problem

The first night I noticed it, I thought it was a man waiting for the bus — a vertical smudge of dark where the street swallowed the sidewalk. The streetlight poured its amber halo, and everything I loved about the city shrank into that ring: cracked concrete, a rusted bench, humming refrigerators. Outside the light, the world went flat and hungry, and the thing watched from the fringe like someone peeking through a curtain.

People call that circle a safety net. I learned to live inside it. I timed my steps to meet the glow and learned the tempo of the night. There are rules: don’t linger too close to the edge, don’t turn your back, don’t bring friends who laugh too loud. It felt ridiculous until it didn’t. A smudge became a shape, the shape learned my 11:27 routine, and it arranged itself.

At first the nights were manageable. I would lift my chin and squint through sodium haze. I saw a shoulder one night, a head the next; sometimes a hand, the suggestion of a foot. The silhouette never moved straight toward the light but adjusted, angling like a predator testing paths, always keeping distance at the circumference. It watched my breathing the way a clock watches time.

I tried logic: kept the lamp glowing at my window and walked under other poles. Nothing else contained the focus like that particular pole. If I skipped the block, the thing waited there the next night anyway, as if the earth favored the place where I chose to stand.

When I told people they smiled and said "urban imagination" and "get a therapist." The practicalities of life police emotion: sleep better, stop caffeine, pick up a hobby. I did it all. I slept for a week. Then the figure learned to walk between streetlights, to be seen for a single heartbeat just beyond one halo and then the next. Two circles, three circles; geometry of watching.

The light taught me quieter things too. It taught me to catalog small belongings: the smell of my jacket, how my left shoe pinched, the taste of cold gum. More dangerous was what it taught me about memory. Once, under that lamp, a name rose like steam and I folded it down and pressed my palms to my pockets until the syllables cooled. The thing listened as if it had ears tuned to regret.

The night I decided to step out, a wind came that smelled like rain and old paper. I walked to the edge and felt the gutter’s breath at my calves. I stood with one foot in warmth and the other in a black so honest it felt like a lie. I expected something loud — a shout or a lurch — but it was only the ordinary noise of a city breathing. Nothing dramatic happens in honest fear; it is its own procession.

I put my free foot forward.

It was not cinematic. The darkness didn’t consume me and the thing didn’t pounce. The silhouette tilted its head, as if surprised, like a dog listening to a command. Something in me unclenched. The margin between us — all those small nights of counting heartbeats — thinned and became a line I could cross. On the other side there was no theatre of monsters, only street and cracked paint and the same humming refrigerators.

Maybe it will find me again. Maybe when the light sputters, the shadow will be closer. Or maybe tomorrow I will walk the street and find it gone, as if it had always been a trick of distance and the city’s appetite for keeping us small. For now I keep my feet moving. I breathe, and the night breathes with me. For now I no longer count the seconds to the safety of a halo. I count the steps I take away from it.