Stay out from last light to first, in one safe spot

The Recipe

1. Pick a safe, legal spot you can sit out a whole night: a beach, a hillside, a friend's garden, a place you already know is calm after dark, not one you're seeing for the first time.
2. Tell one person exactly where you'll be and when you'll be back.
3. Take real warmth, food, water, a way to sit up off the ground, and a light.
4. Get there before the last of the daylight goes, and watch it go.
5. Sit through the early night: the temperature dropping, the last people leaving, the noise thinning out.
6. Stay awake through the dead hours in the middle, the ones you never usually meet, and let them be long.
7. Notice the coldest, quietest point of the night, which comes just before it starts to lift.
8. Watch the sky go from black to grey to the first colour, and the birds start before the light does.
9. Walk home in the early morning, into a day everyone else is only just starting.