Life in a northern town

    I am feeling something new and fresh to me. Somewhat foreign. Not overwhelming and certainly not uninspired. Peace? How do you become acquainted with something of that nature when you've sat under the impression that you've been good friends with that feeling for quite some time? Just shy of one week that I've been here, and something seems to be maturing in me. Ripening. 

    I feel like I am living in the past. Far before my time. Before my Nana's time, matter of fact. Suddenly I am making loose-leaf kettle tea three times a day. Morning, afternoon, and before the dream world welcomes me back home. Walking all around town, eyes to the sky (I have stumbled over the poorly tended infrastructure only a handful of times). 

    Now, there is a creepy basement where I live. Looking down the dark, unkept, seldom visited floors; I see the grounds upon which a younger me would've winced and refused to walk along. Reading more and actually sticking with a singular book until the end. Only being warm when showering. Otherwise in a constant state of goosebumps. Might that be my eternal state the following years spent here? I continuously ask myself this. 

    Convenience feels farther away. Nothing is so instantly gratifying. A nasty, relentless part of my car's engine failed on me Wednesday. Hence the walking about. My presumed result dims farther from being rapid. My patience felt that it was fraying recently. What a quick fix to that, I note to myself. I am thinking about the future. I am thinking about paying rent. I am thinking about my little sister. All of this really is strange. 

    Regardless of whether or not this is the cosmic and objective truth of my reality, I am starting to think that I was in need of this shift. Some inner speaker was beckoning me to diffuse farther and farther away from noise. It is gone now, and I am searching for noise once more because noise is comforting when that is all you know. I want constant music. I want static fuzz. I want voices conversing in the kitchen, down the hall. I want life. 

    My previous understanding was that noise was synonymous with life. That idea morphs now. It is sailing off into the sea of past notions where all of my solidified beliefs bury themselves in marked graves. Things I believed to be true, therefore inarguable and permanent. Life can be quiet. 

    The birds don't always chirp. They take naps. The wind won't constantly blow and brush the tree leaves up against one another, producing that sound that melts me so. Lovers sleep the afternoon away, not always snoring. Lovers sleep like babies. Supple, silent, hardly alive. I am wrong about many things because I am very, very young. You could say that I have a reputation to stand solid in what I think I know but truthfully, I will tell you in private, when all the guests have left, I haven't a clue. Neither do you.

    Nature is dualistic. Where noise is found on one cloud, the garden below is vacant. Where the chimney fire crackles and spits in my Nana's home, my own fireplace is cold and has not been touched since the previous winter. Life has been too noisy for me. So, I will retire to meditate until the static sounds find their way back to me.

They always do.