They say there is a time in the middle of the night called the magic hour.

It’s the hour when the night owls are already asleep, but the early risers have yet to wake. Magic hours, empty vessels of the morning. We pass them by, daily in fact, dreaming old old lovers and the things we have yet to do. We focus on getting through the mundane, so we miss the peculiar, the out of the ordinary. I find myself here again, huddled under blankets illuminated by the glow of a computer screen and the sounds of the city whooshing below me. Loud screams coming from nightclubs as girls stumble on stilts into the street.

I should be thinking about the morning, I should be thinking about words and phrases and things I’m going to do and say. It’s four in the morning. Only the wild ones are awake. The wild ones and me. They are ravishing each other on a dance floor, pulsating and running in circles. The men trying to get laid, the women trying to feel something that negates feeling nothing, and I’m thinking about pennies.

If you pick up a penny on the street, does it matter where it’s been? Does it matter that they don’t use pennies anymore, that the thing is obsolete, traded in at supermarket machines one by one for quarters. It only serves to tell you how much time has gone by if you remember using them.  What does it matter then? If you looked down at that moment and saw something that nobody thinks is worthwhile anymore, what does it matter if you knew it could be something, melted down and pressed into copper and worn around your finger as a promise.

Would it matter then?

Or is this thing now just as empty as all things, as the magic hours on a Saturday night where everyone is too asleep or too drunk to sit and listen to the clocks ticking just a bit louder. To the world beginning and ending, and ending. And ending. Slowly but surely it will come to a close that nobody cared for and nobody fought for and nobody won. It is only in the magic hour that a relic becomes something to think about. The old things, the way we use them and discard them. Where have they gone? The relics of the past that no longer mean anything to us? Is a penny still good luck even though finding one is no meaningless? Do you look at it and mourn of the time that has passed. Do you reject everything that has come since then?

I don’t know, and I wonder if there is anyone in this world that has ever thought this much after finding a penny.

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