In daylight, roving around the city and trapped in obligation, I long for solitude and the piercing sounds of a single flute tipping over candle flame and distorting the dimly golden hue that swells my apartment at nightfall. Yet that yellow meridian almost always reaches an anxiousness that inspires housekeeping or tea ritual until, sleepiness gaining, no choice remains but to sit at the flame and quickly make something before sleep overtakes.

Walk midnight deep into the urban flow. Just step into it and watch lights stroke the skyline in rainbow ecstasies while all of you tumble through the streets. If you can, release completely and feel the hot breath between you, shoulders against yours, unclaimed hands aiming for sex. Then stop and turn around. Have the courage to withstand the current and watch the people cascading toward you. Notice how when you stop conforming, night goers still fail to see you but you become the rock that makes the movement.

Travelers define the road. Without the friction of travel, it would surrender to anonymity, then decay. This past weekend along a two-lane highway across the middle-southern section of Vancouver Island, we learned how precarious that can be.

Nightfall and the storms that accompany it threatened direction and shortened the view. But the surface was solid and we imagined dense protective geography in the darkness flanking the cabin and beyond the edges of the headlights. In that narrow band filled with each other, comfort was palpable. And whatever icy tendril of danger permeated the heat to stir shivers and blushes only diminished the distance between us until the road's destination was obsolete: We were already there.

But on the return trip, sunlight revealed the hazards, before unseen, that encroach on that narrow and tortuous traverse, and we were startled by the peril that had accompanied us all along. We decided the road doesn't fare well against the more powerful natural forces, that it persists only because we confirm it.

I'm surprised to know already the shapes his body makes by the sound of his movement in another room.

Or to know exactly how his familiar will illustrate his mood — such as when he excitedly enters the room and it trots in behind him, or how it hangs obediently straight when he's contained.

His hands are elegant histrionics, articulating the kind of flare or improvisation only masters can safely risk. Even so I can guess before it happens how his fingers will curl around the edges of a thing.

I can recognize the cadence of his footfalls three flights below and even hear his smiles before he shows them to me.