My apartment is loud. I’ve become an expert in deciphering the noise that shivers through my walls and through the thin pane of glass which separates me from the city I love so much.
I know the sound of tires bouncing in-and-out of the pothole on the second lane from the right on the BQE—the one that the semi-trucks hit when merging from the onramp near Atlantic—or the whine of a motorcyclist’s engine as he spies a thin ribbon of open concrete and decides to test his metal.
On nights when I can’t sleep, I lie on my back and let it wash over me. I imagine the driver’s faces and pretend to hear their thoughts. I ask myself—Where do they work? What do they dream about? Do they have love? Are they happy? I like to think so.
During my first weeks in the apartment, I resented these sounds. The unpredictable bursts of traffic would retreat beyond my curtains, only for the merciless humming of a fridge to take center stage. The arrhythmic beats of my neighbor’s footsteps would perform like ersatz drums, and on nights where the temperature falls below 61 degrees, a choir of needy steam pipes and neglected radiators would join the symphony.
Furniture was brought in. Rugs. Paintings. Curtains. All the accoutrements I was assured would absorb vibrations and reduce the decibels. Nothing worked. It became normal for me to wear headphones whenever I was home, until one day I left the apartment with a clogged drain and faucet running. I couldn’t hear the water because my music was blasting. Over time, I realized that it wasn’t the sounds that bothered me, so much as the unfamiliarity of it all. I felt like a stranger—especially to myself—and it seemed like these walls were taunting me in a language I couldn’t understand.
Months into the summer, I was expressing to a friend the sudden and uncharacteristic urge I had to wander into a church. “My ass has done its ten thousand hours of warming a pew and I could care less if I ever heard another sermon. I think I just wanted to feel at home,” I remember saying. He let my statement linger, and after staring pensively into the ceiling, he replied, “Bradley, I thought the goal was to feel at home everywhere.”
I let that statement linger too.
As much as I accepted this remark, I also resented it. I was aching for a handout and he was, in essence, offering me a job. What I wanted was a landing spot or circumstance to anchor to—and his advice felt like an obliteration of that hope. “If everywhere is home, then nowhere is,” I thought. “God knows I already feel like a stray.”
Yet, deep down, I knew he was right. I had work to do.
Winter came and things got louder. The trees in the courtyard came undressed and suddenly there was even less material to scatter the various sounds which paraded through my bedroom. Snow plows working harder than bulls would bellow as they kept the blizzard at bay and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You would pour through the cracked windows of radio’s last few acolytes. The same disturbances, which just a few months ago felt like punishment, now felt—well, tolerable. Pleasant, even. It’s funny how paying attention to things can change them, isn’t it? Rather, it’s funny how paying attention to things always ends up changing me.
To be sure, I questioned whether this was a healthy development or just an aberrant form of Stockholm Syndrome. Whether or not I was playing hopscotch between the razor-thin line that separates apathy and surrender. Time has passed, but that wasn’t the difference maker. One day I went home and decided to study my apartment. To watch it with the same eyes I try to use when my three-year-old niece is struggling through a sentence or when a stranger asks me for directions in broken English. To listen with the same ears I try to use when being told I am wrong or when a close friend is vouchsafing their darkest secret.
Truth be told, I am still trying. And I don’t just mean with my apartment.
About the Author:
Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that you are guaranteed to love.
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