the song outside my window.

There is a song outside my window: a melody unique to every place from which I watched the world. Everywhere I’ve slept plays itself back to me each day.

            As a child, that song was soft with buzzing wings or chirping beaks, marked by the occasional wheels on the asphalt of our street. In hot summers, the rise and fall of cicadas, instantly recognizable, joined the symphony of the outside in predictable looping chorus.

            There was the song of the house the city built itself around; where long ago the only melody was wind across the plains there now was the repetitive ba-dunk of the oil rig. As I lay awake in the room’s blue light, the long, mournful blast of the night train’s horn, a mile away, cries out, long and slow, followed by the rattle of iron on steel, the sound a sense of comfort that the world was still there.

            There was the house where the song was no song at all, the absence of chirps and barks and quiet cars, this place so far removed from town that even the creatures around us felt that they could sleep, unworried and unhurried, resting their wings and beaks and claws until first light once again stirred them into wakefulness. But the old grandfather clock cut through the silence with its metallic, steady metronome…tick – tick – tick…counting seconds ‘til we woke once more.

            There was the song of the city: a constant cacophony of sirens, shouting, train tracks, and pumping bass, slamming doors and footsteps echoing on marble floors. I never heard a bird those years. Instead I woke each morning to the steady brass of engines, the buses’ faithful schedule of screeching brakes, and the boombox of the boy next door. Sometimes at night, when I thought perhaps stillness had come at last to the city block, there was always a human voice, distant, somewhere on the street, crying to be heard.

            Now I’m gone from the city to the suburbs, full circle from my first memories. And of course, a song is playing.

It’s strange, but somehow this song is all the songs at once. Every sound I ever knew by night or afternoon plays now in one great band outside my window. The highway hums behind me. Backyard grills and stereos. TVs loud enough to be heard through window screens, and somewhere, a lawnmower roars to life. The car tires on the street outside. Birds and barking dogs at dawn but silence in the night, as the world rests its weary wings. Airplane drones and train horns and sirens pierce the quiet, distant, though, like the memories they stir. I think to myself that this is the song I want to play on forever, its many lines all pieces of a life, lines of nights and afternoons and mornings past. Somehow it feels like home, though I’ve known home so many times before. Each sound reminds me of something I know so well, and when my neighbor’s windchimes play, I swear I’ve been here before.

Sometimes, I turn the TV down and simply sit and listen. I breathe in and close my eyes.

            The song outside my window sings of moments I’ve already lived. Perhaps it’s that familiarity that brings the sadness and the joy all rushed and mingled in together.   

            But this particular moment will never play again.

            So may that orchestra of life, her highway hum and airplane engines, bear me on the wings of memory to some place far away until the time comes the music runs out, and I only hope I hear this song in the world beyond our own.