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The writer in me loves the nighttime. I imagine creeping up on the sleeping world to take it unawares. The night tells us its secrets, and demands the same of us, unheld-back. It’s a space for reflection. It feels hidden enough for a young couple to “go in for their first kiss.”

But the night can also be a time when the young couple “knocks front teeth” and feels the sudden terror of that. The night can be rife with danger: dark, too quiet, supine, riddled with the regrets of the day’s long life. It can be fraught with desires and the futility to act on them. A wished-for futurity that won’t come. It can be a time when the heart races, and the only way to slow it is to get up, open the front door and, as if enacting Nietzsche’s nudge to “Remain faithful to the earth,” step out into the world and take a deep breath under the little afterlives of its street lamps.

I’ve been told that love poems and funny poems are the most difficult variety to write. I’d add travel poems to that list, as well. Let me start over.

For many, the pursuit of a career in writing is quite literally that. Pursuit. One that has taken (and continues to take) me from state to state, school to school, and job to job, following barely visible tracks and trails. A mentor here, a workshop community there. A published poem here, a note of encouragement there. Sacrifices have to be made and things tend to get complicated when a second person enters the picture, especially if that person is also a writer.

“Familiar Stranger” is from a larger series with seven poems of the same title. My poem in HFR is the first one I wrote; while writing, I was thinking about the thin line between certainty and uncertainty, moving from the certainty of “to break a bottle” and “must fill it with chemicals” to the doubt-filled “Had I spent all/day driving? It’s hard to say.”