Light Observation
It was Sunday night at around 2 in the morning when some idiot in my dorm building burned popcorn and the alarms drove us all out of the building to await the permission of the fire department to go back inside. Standing outside in the cold, I noticed the way the emergency lights from the fire truck were flashing and lighting up the area.
In frigid air under an almost starless sky, the kind only found near big cities, a bunch of listless college students were milling about. All around them the trees were being lit up in blues and reds flashing and pulsing like strobe lights in the dark. The light hit the bare branches of the trees drawing the outlines of the empty space, making it seem deeper, darker. Even beneath the street lamp, the colors from the emergency vehicles danced on the pole and played in the branches. As the wind blew the branches seemed to jump from place to place rather than sway under the influence of this unnatural lighting.