White Noise
Alex Wollinka
When my apartment is empty, I live as if someone has their ear pressed to my door. I walk softly, keeping the electric fan on so that it whirs and rattles. I search for a clean glass in the kitchen cabinet, ignoring the dust collecting on the top shelf, empty mason jars shifting and clinking together. I’m hungover, and my mouth is dry.
I stand at the sink, twisting an ice tray so it cracks like an aching spine.
I stare through the closed blinds of the tiny window, where the grass outside is dry and the chain link fence has never stopped anything from getting through.
Four ice cubes, four clinks. The sound of a faucet. Ice popping in water.
The walls in this apartment have been repainted so many times the corners look round, and water damage is puffing up near the baseboard, forming bloated pouches I’m afraid to look at because I know it’s getting worse. Beige paint coats the wire covers, the outlets, the vents. But the layers aren’t thick enough to block out my neighbor’s muffled voices on the other side of the wall. It sounds like they’re arguing. I feel tense.
There is too much of my childhood in me.
I feel the cold water wash down my throat, spreading through my chest to the pit of my empty stomach. I force myself to finish it. I need an Advil. I need a shower. I need to vacuum the rug before my roommate gets home.
Afternoon drags itself into evening with a familiar symphony of sounds. Cars with idling engines, people talking in the parking lot, my phone buzzing with texts I won’t answer until it’s so late I’ll have to come up with an excuse.
I settle on a headache. When the time comes, I tell my friends I have a headache.
I lie on the carpet and watch tiny bugs crawl across the ceiling, their shadows long in the setting sun-- they always seem to get in through the holes in my window screens. They don’t bother me much, but their dead bodies by my desk lamp do. It bothers me how they always die in the light.
I need to call my pharmacy. I need to text my brother. I need to be alone.
I want to peel the halves of my brain apart like a clementine, to pick away the strings, to softly press the bruises on my mind, asking does it hurt now?
And it would. There is too much of my childhood in me, still.
The pajamas my mom used to wear when I was up with a fever at night-- a faded oversized t-shirt. Cotton. The scent of an unfamiliar mattress, the smell of his laundry detergent and sweat. The sharpness of hair clips, the taste of wintermint gum. The smell of vomit in church bathrooms, locker room bathrooms. Cold hands on my skin.
It’s starting to snow. I tell myself to go to bed.
My eyes adjust to dark as I listen to the sound of heating pipes cracking and clanging under their dusty ventilated cover, like someone banging on a metal sheet. Again and again.
I wrap myself in childhood rituals. As I drift off, I imagine all the ways I might die. Five, ten, twenty years from now. Numb on anesthetics and full of tubes, splayed open like a vivisection. Microorganisms multiplying in my cells. My heart swollen and pounding. My face smothered with quilts and pillows. One day I will stop believing I will die young, but it may be well into my forties. I may be wrong.
One day, the soundtrack will cut off forever.
The sound of rusty swing sets and windchimes, slurred speech and loud music, an old house settling with pops and groans. The clinking glass, the whir of the fan, the cracking ice and heating pipes.
This song has no beginning and no end. The last note is coming-- not like a missile, but like snowfall, like ash sifting down from the sky, like a music box winding down. And when the last snowflake lays to rest on my windowsill, I will be asleep, dreaming, under a roof covered in white. When the heavens light up with imaginary silent explosions, I will be asleep, dreaming, a blanket pulled up to my chin. Five, ten, twenty years ago.
And my mother will be just down the hall in her pajamas, a warm light under her door, taking something for her headaches.