White Noise

skylight, by Diana Kimball.

Indoors, I keep a white noise machine and a sighing fridge; gray curtains hang like sofa fabric pulled away from window panes. Through the openings, billboards array toward a vanishing point. Laundry sits tousled just outside the frosted glass wardrobe. Vitamin bottles cast lunar shadows nearby.

Trying to escape the wind this weekend, I found a sheltered pond with a seersucker surface, and huddled nearby talking to my dad on the phone. I folded my arms. “It's like we all found these ways to exist when we first started trying,” he said, “and as long as those ways worked, we never changed. But sometimes they cost more than we know.” We talked about how ideas can enter and echo, becoming more than they were. Everything is better and everything is harder; so we search for placid things.