Soon I will be moving into another apartment, so I’m writing an observation about the night views I can see from my place now.
It is a windy night, so windy that my plastic boxes on the balcony begin to shake. The night is unsettling, but surprisingly quiet. By quiet I mean that except for the wind and clock-ticking, there isn’t a sound. From the level-43 apartment, I can see house lights, streetlights and traffic lights flickering in the distance. Why do lights flicker? They said it was called the “terrestrial scintillation”. This scintillation makes me uneasy, because it changes, as if it is moving, floating; yet we all know that the lights are always going to be there, at least for some time. This thought calms me down. I suppose it is in people’s nature to hate changes, but we all must change, mustn’t we? Changes mark our existence.
Now it’s getting colder, rain starts to drizzle. I can see them on the French window. There are three sides of French windows in the living room, so the view is spectacular. I can see the St Patrick’s Cathedral, the RMIT campus and the beach, the sea. You can experience the amazing feeling of the Earth’s immensity, standing in the middle of living room, watching over the city operating orderly, the people and the cars busy getting to their location B. I wonder how many stories are behind all this—the growth of a city, which is what the people dedicate their lives to. It is the people who bring the city to life, the insignificant but great human. There are so many twinkling lights which out-shine the stars. In older times, we look up to see thousands of stars in the sky; nowadays, we look down to see thousands of artificial stars on land. Isn’t this fascinating? Scattered over this piece of land, lights of yellow, of white and of red, shining in the distance, beyond horizon.
If I don’t look this far, there’s a building standing right in front of my eyesight. On the top of that, blue, purple, pink, green and red lights, switch in order, looking rather like our world in which people hanker for entertainment: so colourful, so diverse. Down beside the building, there lies a busy street. If I don’t know they are cars, I’d imagine they are water of red and yellow colour flowing in each other’s opposite directions.
Drizzling has stopped. Wind blows stronger. This will be a very long night. Good night.
Filmic Possibility
