Night thoughts.

I have become accustomed, even fond of the long early morning walk across Paris, from wherever the evenings events may have carried me, back to my roof-top nook on the 4th floor above Rue Quincampoix.There is part of me that has come to see the late night, early morning Paris streets as being more obviously and honestly Parisien than any other.

After the waves of tourists have broken and receded.
After the flurried interchange between restaurants and bars.
... Even after the metro.

All thats left is the quiet hum, of dim-lit streets and alleys traversed by the very occasional interloper wandering and wondering. The streets become the property of Paris ... and the scattered homeless that sleep in them. 
Those, like myself, passing though seem to share a knowing momentary familiarity with each other... last night a perfect example. Crossing the Canal St.Martin, a pause to take a picture or two in the eery, empty lamp-lit sheen of the rain-slicked cobbles.
A passerby stops.
A disarming smile and a request to see what I took.
Appreciation. Can I have it? Phone number taken, and the picture wings its emailed way.
A little thing but not insignificant.

But we are truly just the interlopers, those who pass through on our way back to wherever we comfortably huddle out the witching hours.
The homeless own the streets of Paris, and they inhabit them more totally and more nonchalantly than anywhere else Ive ever seen.
The family of 4 squeezed into a wide stone doorway as though it was a bed in a Roald Dahl book...
The pair of friends that sipped from a bottle, huddled beneath a plastic sheet strung between two park benches and the comforting glow of the lamp above...
In the wet, every doorstep and stoop is a bedroom.
In the dry, they sleep as surely and as soundly as they do randomly... in the middle of a path, square. In such a way you are inclined to question yourself, and feel that perhaps it is you who has suddenly lost your grip upon the reality and normality of things.

Paris by night. Wonderfully strange streets.