The night changes everything.

Earth falls to her knees in forlorn silence as breathing slows to a whisper.

Trees–the only things that grow upwards, higher and higher, defying the momentum of gravity itself–lose their magic and become conspirators with mortals, sinking their toxic gas into the atmosphere.

The sky darkens and deepens with melancholy.

And the people, they’re left clasping splinters of light from smothered stars.

I wanted to do a story about the night because it is so special.

It’s a time when children, exhausted after bouts of play, gaze at each other over plates of pratawith vacant eyes.  It’s a time when lovers slip into lazy slumber amid crumpled sheets and tangled hair. It’s a time when bosom friends fall asleep miles apart, telephone dangling limply from their hands.

It’s also a time when dark emotions steal furtively through glass windows to prowl in the susurrus of the restless mind, despairing the wretched, in a moment of insanity, with the sweetest muse.

This photoessay is quite unusual because I didn’t choose to tell a compelling story with 7 or 8 strong pictures.  Instead of a story with predictable directions, this is a tapestry of quotes and seemingly-ordinary images that will prove gripping only when woven to experiences, memories, opinions, values, and emotions that differ from person to person.

Night, it seems, can’t be confined to a box of prosaic images and words.

The night changes everything. And this is a story that frees the hours that hide between the shadows of the night:

Most quotes are carefully selected from a pool of 32 quarter-hour and half-hour interviews held during numerous journeys to places such as Chinatown, Little India, Aljunied, and Tanjong Pagar. These places are in close proximity to gaudy megamalls and drinking spots in Clarke Quay, Dhoby Ghaut, and Harbourfront but seldom portrayed. Other quotes are made by the esteemed dead or, in one scenario,  extracted from a personal repository.

With luck and great serendipedity, I chanced upon a piece of music composed by a friend and colleague Justin Koh. With permission and gratitude, it was selected as background music for its coalescence of strong emotive elements and auditory clues that suggest an insomniac experience (dripping tap, metronome, etc).