One Dawn

Having been woken up by someone else's alarm clock, I laid in bed staring up for a while. I went through all the usual worries of lying in the dark--will I get my work done, will I escape the monster from under my bed, what will I be when I grow up--I decided to sit cross legged on a chest of drawers aimlessly looking at daybreak from my window.

I had seen cats do it in movies, in grandpa houses and especially I had seen them from the outside. This was my best impression of a cat, and after some time I finally understood that it wasn't about looking out, or even staring out. No matter how concentrated they looked, cats were really focused on listening.

From my position I could not see much anyways. The thermometer had been slowly, but steadily descending back were one would expect for these northern latitudes. Two in three leaves on the tall birches lining my street were going yellow, making streaks against the tough remaining green. Either way, they'd only diffuse the light from the opposite building; I imagined them projecting their shape on my building's wall.

But as soon as I stopped concentrating on image, far away muffled sounds started to paint an infinitely detailed blind picture. There were planes flying, taking dads away from their sleepy eyed sons that awoke in turn to banging sounds of heating pipes. Someone on the floor above was rushing out; she lived alone and and was going to work. I could hear her somber heels as she stormed from one end of the house to the other. She wasn't afraid of waking anyone up and she never closed a door. The pipes kept banging hinting at the inside air warming up. The covers pulled a squeaky bed on the other side of the wall, while the week changes a Sunday doze to Monday strain.

The heating flares, bubbling the water lukewarm before it flowed. Clumsy pre-breakfast hands undressed, and dropped the shower-head on the cheap tin shellac bathtub. I thought I heard a man's voice, but maybe it wasn't true. Opposite to what one might think, far away sounds are easier, clearer; as if they shed any uncertainties while they travel the distance between their origin to my ear.

The highway churned and hummed in the distance to the south and east, where the grey of the sky turned into a pinkish diffuse glow before fading once again into light blue. The cars trumpeted their repetition loop into the metal side rails as if to send a sonar signal to know where they are. They might as well ring endlessly around the city, around the buildings and the houses, encircling everyone's hopes for the day, leaving everyone's mistakes in the past and levigating people's preoccupations for the week to come.

There were radio hisses from downstairs and kitchen utensils tingling on tables, there were baby cries and parents' sighs. I remembered when this time, these (and other) sounds, meant school and meant small problems seeming large. I imagined the blond boy across the hall, as he stared at the wall in silence while his mom put a sock on, then the other. How bigger and weirder and unknown must all these noises sound to him. But, they are indefinably a part of his world, a part of the whole. He was born there, born into it, born into the clanging and the rushing on the stairs, born into the rain ticks and door clicks, the ringing and the humming, the brushing and the flowing.

All around him is the life of the city waking up and gaining consciousness of a new week, or a routine week. But as in every awakening and every gain, there is a loss slow and dark of what has passed. We remember it in silence.

for S.L.