Someone else

Another dream. And I forget it again. Concrete walls and paths and a phone call. A quiet parting.

It's not so surprising that I have trouble sleeping when I think of how thin the walls are here (which is not a good thing to think of, because like the ring of tinnitus, the beat of your heart, the draw of your breaths, as soon as you fix your mind on it you can think of nothing else). I can hear whole epochs of private lives played out. People clearing their throats. Pacing from one wall to another for whatever purpose. Running taps. Creaking beds. Lone voices, phone calls - or at the very least conversations with themselves. Once your mind is fixed on it, it becomes like a wave, a whole collection of waves, sweeping up and down the building and over you, submerging us all in personal histories never repeated.

I can't stand it. I had this friend once who was in a stage play that toured the country, and often she would perform outdoors. When she looked into the sitting crowd she saw something similar. It even made her forget who she was, who she was playing. A vast shimmer of fluttering movements which her mind coalesced into some kind of pattern, some continuous ripple, until she realised it was just the accumulation of a crowd scratching their own itches, brushing aside their hair, shifting to get comfortable. But it still bothered her and I from what I last heard, I don't think she acts on the stage any more.

In my old house I could do something similar while I lay in bed. I would close my eyes and the familiarity of all my years would let my senses spread out into the walls and floorboards and carpeting and foundations, and I'd recognise every footstep, know the meaning of every creak, the thudding plunge of my brother down the stairs, the clumsy quiet of my father creeping in at night, and sometimes now I forget where I am and when I wake up to the sound of someone moving down the hallway outside, I think for a moment that I am back there, until the footsteps come nearer, then pass, diminish, and I remember. But every sound makes up the elements of something like an identity, imagined or not, and our sense spread out until everything becomes part of us, or part of a kind of Sight that if you're lucky will devour it all before it intoxicates you.