Night Sounds
Our house is filled with knocking at night. In the apartment above my bedroom and office, they start stacking heavy piles of wooden pallets, it seems, beginning around eleven and ending a half-hour later. Also, walking around in heavy-soled shoes and I know exactly which is their squeakiest floorboard. Take me up there; I’ll walk you to it.

They begin loading their clothes washer (this I know is true), also their dryer, and hitting “Start” on both. In my bed, I hear and feel the rumble, hear the water make its gurgling exit between Rinse and Tumble Dry. The dryer too, as it growls and shakes. Usually, those things don’t disturb me from sleep any more than the trains that pass through here every couple hours on some weeknights.
Their whistle: Long, long, short, long.

I went through a bad spell last year. During that time, the train whistle, which I heard at two a.m. at my old apartment, felt like a part of my own personal disquiet; a dramatic underscore to my own insomnia. Train whistles can mean anything. When I was little, sleeping in the trundle bed at my grandma’s, they meant that shiver of risk: Train train coming from the wild unknown and disappearing to the same—but meanwhile it was now right here, mere yards from my bed, the safest place in the world. Sometimes I still catch a spark of that feeling. Mostly though, my brain has tuned it out. I fold clothes and put them away, or read, or sleep—right through it.