nyctous adj. feeling quietly overjoyed to be the only one awake in the middle of the night—sitting alone with a laptop and a cup of tea or strolling down the center line of an abandoned street—taking in the world like an empty theater between productions, stripped down to a simple black box, open to be whatever you want it to be. From Nyctocereus, a genus of cactus that blooms only at night. Pronounced “nik-tuhs.”
