A few nights ago I heard sirens and I was struck by the strangeness of it. Mostly I was struck by the strangeness of it being strange.
We live far away from anything. It’s a tiny city to begin with and we don’t even live within the boundaries of that city. It’s just shy of horror movie rural. We don’t hear sirens because they are sounds of human activity. This siren didn’t last very long and, as such, was most likely someone being pulled over for speeding. Still, we’re far enough out not to hear things like that often either. Things are quiet here. The loudest noise in the night is my dog barking wildly at the deer that run through our yard each night to drink from the lake.
The one non-dorm-room apartment I had in DC was about two blocks from a hospital. I heard this siren last night and remembered that apartment. It feels, now, as though I used to fall asleep to an endless loop of sirens.
When I moved back here the first time, four years ago, I was constantly struck by the silence. I’d noticed the contrast on breaks, but it felt different when I moved back. On breaks this was vacation. When I knew I lived here again it was somehow quieter and heavier. This silence had weight.
It made it hard to sleep. I love the buzzing din of city life. My first apartment in Paris was in a quiet area — across the street from a nursing home — but being up so high somehow wound the noise up through the air and into my window. Or so I thought. It got considerably louder when I moved to a ground floor apartment, a few blocks off from the Eiffel Tower, where I lived for most of my time there. Louder and somehow better. I remember my first night in both of these places and feeling oddly comforted by those noises. It was peaceful to me, somehow.
I have some I-grew-up-with-a-bunch-of-siblings theories on why I like this noise at night, but mostly I think it’s that it’s associated with places I wanted to be. I wanted to be in DC and Paris. I get excited about that noise whenever I stay with my grandparents in Chicago, again, because I want to be there and it’s like the city rocking me to sleep saying, “Shh, shh, you’re here.”
Four years ago, the silence here was heavy with feelings of a thing lost. It weighed down my chest with fears of what came next. The silence spoke to some deeply-held paralyzing fear of nothingness. I remember that unsettled feeling as vividly as the contentment I felt in hearing murmured French conversations I couldn’t understand.
It caught me by surprise, then, when I noticed the siren. I noticed it and then noticed myself noticing it.
I realized how much lighter the silence is. It’s different now. I’m not trapped. Not in love with it either, of course, but not trapped. There is no suffocating weight. I don’t fall asleep struggling under the heaviness of all this silence.
The silence might not be a comforting lullaby, reassuring me of something, but it doesn’t stifle my breathing. I heard this noise in the distance and realized that I am OK here.