I don't often crave the quiet, but summertime
in the city makes me yearn for a vacation,
a reprieve from the never ending ice cream truck song
that loops for hours outside my front windows.
I despise the fast car that drove by so quickly
it made another car alarm beep, assaulted by the speed.
A man yells expletives down the block, people call back
to him from windows.He tells them to fuck off and invites
them into the street, like a true New Yorker. There is a
cacophony of honking from disgruntled drivers that grow impatient waiting for their passenger and
angry when another vehicle blocks their way.
My patience wears thin after the same aggressive
reggaetone song blasts from a low-rider parked alongside the
hydrant. The kid upstairs runs room to room above me,
I wish he would stop. Now, for the ball that is being tossed
against the shared wall, again, and again. I hope it disappears
soon under a dresser, left to collect dust in obscurity.
Somedays I can sit on the kitchen floor and smile as I listen to the
sounds of cabinets closing, my neighbors speaking muffled Spanish,
my neighbor shredding on his flying v guitar, the mariachi band
starting up a few backyards down, to the girl singing Bruno Mars at the
top of her lungs. I love the aliveness of the city, the assortment, but today
the buzzing is too loud and I am too irate to appreciate the chaos.
I want to retreat, to run into the mountains where
time can only be told by the positioning of the sun.
I yearn to hear the chorus of crickets, the ribbits
of the frogs, the persistence of the woodpecker, the slow
snapping of twigs from deer carefully traversing the woods.
I want to hear the cry from the hawk, the the helicopter wings
of the grouse, and witness the conversations of the birds.
The kitchen smells of freshly baked muffins, there is chicken salad
from the leftovers in the fridge. I'll take the homemade meal and eat
it out on the porch. There will be no music, only the sounds around me.
It is so quiet that I can hear the gravel warn me when someone
approaches me in my solitude. I dream of looking out at the inky
black mountain with the deepening gradient sky as the moon rises.
But, for now, I don't have a place of my own to retreat to,
no safe haven in the woods waiting for me. Someday I'll have that cabin,
a restorative place where I can recharge and shift my perspective.
A place that allows me to appreciate the bustle of people living in small boxes,
stacked on top of each other.
Love this and I do know I could not deal listening to the chaos all the time. I too yearn for a place in the mountains