Rain patters softly on the window panes of my little apartment. Inside the air is warm and dry. Outside it’s evening rush hour and I hear cars roll by, making that familiar whooshing sound car tires make on wet roads. My blinds are drawn and down except for a small one-foot gap near the floor I can see out of from where I sit. Cars streak by as candy cane streams of red and white light outside. The opening is doesn’t give me a full view outside, just a peak beyond my little place of comfort. Those headlights and taillights fall onto the damp pavement like auras around each vehicle. The setting sun got tired trying to keep us warm during winter and has already decided to turn in for the night, leaving only the little lamp lights to illuminate the sidewalks and side streets. Homes on the hills around me glow softly from the lights of people back home from the day of industry.
Around me lay blankets and pillows, unfolded laundry and haphazardly strung Christmas lights that dangle behind my TV and onto the command hooks I put up on my walls with no real thought toward where the most sensible and aesthetically pleasing place would be to put some command hooks. I think I just opened the Amazon box when they arrived, tore open the packaging, and put them up as quick as possible. I just wanted to hang my coats. Some half-burnt candles and some fully exhausted candles sit on different tables and surfaces around the room, none of them on though the more I think about them the more I’d like to see their flicker. Inside the only movement of light is the annoyingly methodical blue blinking of my dishwasher telling me that it is a dishwasher. I didn’t bother to turn off my reading lamp from when I spent a few minutes trying to read a few more pages of the book I’m absorbed in currently this morning. But it’s so hard to read nowadays, when every passing thought can be investigated, and every lingering scratch itched by some app on my phone.
I wish I could read like I did back in Denver, when I would sit in bed all day barely moving from when I woke up till when the sun went down. Back then I would crack the window of my room to feel the breeze of the cool mornings, sitting drawn up in bed with the latest copy of Artemis Fowl or Sherlock Holmes or whatever captured my wandering little mind for that period.
Now I sit and look for new emails to be annoyed with and new texts to not want to respond to. I think of something strange like “I wonder if that person liked my last Instagram post?”, so I go and look and lo and behold they have! But I’m also now curious at how much it costs to live in Manhattan, so I’ll watch that video and learn absolutely nothing of any relevance at all but hey it’s 20 minutes now from when I stopped reading and started scrolling through these pages of things that don’t matter. So that’s something.
I don’t even wander in a good wandering way, as one wanders through the gardens of Versailles or through quiet streets on a rainy night (like this one) thinking those rich weighty thoughts that get coaxed out of the like a snake charmed out of a basket. The jolting speed of our world makes it hard to feel comfortable anywhere, doing anything for me. Sitting here in peace I want to be moving and doing things and when I’m going so fast in life checking every notification and listening to every voice all I want to do is slow down. If there’s a central feeling nagging me the most it’s the feeling that as hard as I try, as much as I’d like, I am nothing more than a passenger of my era and a product of my circumstances. I’ll buy what I don’t need off Amazon and feel bad for being a consumer because of a video I watched on YouTube. In my cozy little apartment with cinnamon scented pinecones and a fresh pine wreath that smells delicious every time I get home and open the door I feel as an oxymoron, calmly anxious, distractedly focused. And all the cars whooshing by in the soft rain carry souls with their own problems too.