The house is never quiet. The longer I spend inside, the more intimately familiar I become with every noise and sound.
In the early morning, birds chirp in the backyard, interrupting what usually is a somberness I can’t describe. One’s warbling in the trees, another’s crowing.
Loud thumps above my head indicate that the neighbors are probably awake, and hopefully not working on their third child. There aren’t any quick stamps back and forth across the ceiling in rapid succession so I know the little elephants aren’t up yet.
An hour or so later, while I’m still pretending to go back to sleep, I recognize Pops’ deep shuffling feet. He doesn’t step hard until he has his boots on and is ready to leave the house. His morning steps are muffled and scrap the wooden floors like a ghost that hadn’t parted with his shoes in the afterlife. Then comes the weight. Weighted sounds on the boards in the living room, weighted footsteps on the cracked ceramic tiles in the kitchen, give the distinct impression that these are feet that never frolicked.
The neighbors to the left of the house, in the basement apartment, are either hammering in a picture frame or attempting morse code. The incessant knocking couldn’t be closer if someone came and yelled each sound into my ear.
That’s when the noise really starts to ratchet up a few decibels.
The oven makes a whooshing and clicking when the heat kicks on. When the upstairs bathroom toilet flushes the following gurgle is like a violent waterfall spilling into the wall, swirls around like a disembodied spirit, and then runs away into the ground. The shower, or bathtub probably, sounds surprisingly gentle. The radiators clack, hiss, and shoot off sudden bombs that seem so angry that we’ve quietly assumed a demon possessed the boiler room.
By the time I’m dressed and awake, everything is moving. The TVs, the radios, the barely concealed conversations that leak through the floors and walls. Every laugh or shout or movement is broadcast for hours on end, and distantly in the background, I can still hear sirens screaming up and down the avenue.
At night, it’s like the chill from outside has a whispering voice as it passes over the windows. If there’s rain it will either patter or bang against the house. People up top step in small circles like they would between the bed and the TV or closet, instead of strides from room to room. Something heavy drops onto a thing with springs. The kids hunker down to one room and play their loudly animated cartoons or video games.
Sometimes a random car blasts Biggie or soca as it passes by with bass so loud that it vibrates the window panes. There’s the obnoxious engine revving from those guys with motorcycles that do donuts and pop up their tires in front of McDonald’s. It’s kind of nice to hear people, raucous, living and breaking laws.
Time bleeds into twilight and bewitching hours. When I try to sleep, it’s the phone humming or the laptop playing mindlessly that distracts me. Occasionally, it’ll be the middle of the night before I realize I’m anticipating the sound so much that I’ve stopped hearing altogether and I start to panic in the stillness.
Pops’ coughing somewhere, I think. I didn’t notice a symptom before and he’s stopped snoring. I open my eyes, and the flash of warmth that instantly engulfs my face, lets me know that I was never awake.
Sitting up in the dark, I take deep breaths and listen to my own heart beating.
