The blue hour

There's an hour that belongs to no one: not to the day that has already given up nor to the night that hasn't come to collect yet.

In it the world lowers its voice, switches off its arguments, and things tell each other the truth quietly, with no witnesses.

The trees become silhouettes that no longer pretend to be trees. The windows hesitate between lighting up or not, like someone hesitating between calling or letting it be.

I go out at this nameless hour because it's the only one that doesn't require me to be someone. I walk blue through the blue, half erased, reconciled with what I wasn't and with the little I might still be.

It lasts so briefly that you learn to inhabit it in a hurry, to fill yourself with that provisional calm before the night switches on its usual questions.

Then it goes fully dark and we get our names back, our affiliations, debts, faces. But for a moment we were only this: a colour between two hours, under no obligation to last.