Home Sounds

the bus that didn’t run for the past year and a half thuds by, clearly ignoring the stop sign, perhaps to make up for lost time; planes fly overhead, leaving trails of drones, the sky a metaphor for a different void, the void of time during which aircraft were never heard because no one was going anywhere; the laundry machine churns, my clothes shedding three weeks of travel across four time zones and as many beds; the clothes dryer’s elves chirrup their little end-of-cycle melody; there is no HVAC sound because the neighborhood is temperate in a way that feels alien; the building creaks to remind me it is almost 100 years old; my body creaks to remind me I feel a kinship with the building; there is the thrum of traffic mere blocks away, and I wonder why anyone is in a rush to get anywhere