Last week it was raining and warm enough to leave a window open at night to listen to the rain and I never shut it, and I’ve been going to sleep listening to the neighborhood’s ambient noise, airplanes and gentle passage of trains behind my place and the accompanying bells, the traffic on the sort-of busy street that parallels the other side and sometimes neighbors laughing as they come in late.
It’s not been cold enough to notice, just a cracked window anyway, couple inches. Have started hearing birds in the morning, or maybe I just didn’t notice them before.
I had friends growing up who lived in a third-floor apartment on Belmont and some nights I’d sleep on their couch, and with the window open heard the same things outside. My house was only a few doors south, other side of Belmont, past a couple apartment buildings in the neighborhood some.
In either fifth or sixth grade, one had to get stitches in his stomach. In the emergency room he said dropped scissors punctured his stomach, but someone in his home stabbed him. We all got along, were close for a time. The younger of the two was my age but older, the older was a year or two older but much older. And we didn’t say that then but it colored our friendship because I wasn’t as mature. Our families seemed similar in a lot of ways, and we both moved a lot, and because of that were only in each other’s lives for a year or so.
I remember going to sleep on their couch, the living room feeling dark but also able to see around the TV and shelves by the street lamps outside because they lived on the third floor. One of those narrowish glass-front particle-board black-veneered stands for the VCR and stereo receiver. It didn’t take long for my eyes to adjust, and if I closed my eyes I didn’t notice the light, but if I opened them I could make out silhouettes.
I haven’t talked to them in twenty, twenty-five years. Since grade school. I can see with hindsight my first autonomy as a kid, the first steps out into the world and finding boundaries. First hobbies and first crushes and learning about music and everything else becoming real, just the constant education of adolescence.
We grew up near enough the airport that it was an easy distraction, something to keep me and my brothers entertained for a bit, when we were young. This was before they redid Irving on the airport’s south end so my memory of the drive around there is a little different than it is now, though I drive it now to untangle things I can’t in a quiet room.
The drives to the airport weren’t just to the airport. My grandfather worked in a train yard over there, and it felt like a big deal driving by and seeing the trains knowing he worked on them. Though, you could get there following the tracks just the other side of my friend’s apartment. We lived close enough to see people crawl through or under the stopped cars from our front steps.
And who knows for what other reasons we needed to get out of the house but I spent a lot of nights, my memory is anyway, that I spent a lot of nights sitting on the hood of a car or leaning against the windshield, just off Irving, watching the planes come and go and falling asleep around dusk or after, lying down best I could in the backseat with my head near an open window and the street lamps coming and going overhead, the breeze the most naturally comforting thing I could fathom as a kid. These are summer memories.
And the trains, I can hear the sound of the slack getting pulled out of the line, the clunk-clunk-clunk down the line after the engine is at speed and the cargo just has to catch up. The trains were there, always. I don’t know why the sounds are so memorable in this context now, or why I associate the sounds with our quiet street on a summer night after the everyone who’d been outside drinking, on our porch or in chairs around the front of the house or across the street, after everyone had gone inside for the night. I don’t know why I was awake then, why I remember being outside alone, and I don’t remember anyone else being awake anyway. I can see down the street toward the tracks, the street lamps are yellow and the sky is dark, I can feel the discomfort of sitting on the front step, and the sights and sounds now are similar enough to the sights and sounds then for it to instigate memory of all these other things.
It’s calming, though I don’t know why, and that itself is unnerving. Gentle traffic outside. A train engine idling, the bell stopped but then ringing out a measured cadence just before the train moves along. Sometimes a plane rattles the windows, but it’s mostly in the background, and from the front room I can turn off the lights and turn the blinds and out an old wooden window watch the planes and blinking lights descending toward the airport over the tops of the apartments nearby, and some nights I see the moon.
Elusive comfort and a resignation maybe, to what I’m not sure, but like a slow descent. It’s the feeling like after the shock of a death passes and you’re left with an acceptance of the circumstances and the anxiety of wondering how things could have gone different, how, in as many ways as you can imagine, until you’ve run that out and are just exhausted. Or defeated.
How could anything ever be different. I don’t know how. Who does? Most nights I watch and listen.
Reading
Once
Nobody’s Angel
Holly
Listening
TV On The Radio
Glass Animals