LIKE A STREAM

With the window open in my new room in my new house, the road outside is quiet but not silent. Cars flow past, displacing air, an irregular pulse of swoosh and whine, peppered with the occasional grumble or pop. I once thought this sound, this urban, human sound would irk me but it doesn’t. The road has two lanes in either direction, and the intersection is uncomplicated, giving no one reason to honk or curse. Most of the drivers are commuters, heading toward Highway 24 or or exiting from it, traveling a path they tread twice daily, 5 days a week, 20 days a month, a route they know so well by now that they follow it without awareness, their higher cognition engaged with dinner plans, bombings in Iraq, a band’s new single. In a way, then, the sound isn’t human at all. A collection of unconscious organic particles, sheathed in iron, flowing over asphalt bedrock, a trickle of water writ large by orders of magnitude. Looking at it breaks the thought, the shapes and colors too familiar, the faces within so clearly alive. But to just sit and listen, or cook and not listen, or read and be likewise consciously unaware, it is like a stream.