Inside the repeating track of white noise I require to sleep, there exists a world. I hear ethereal sirens blaring fuzzily through the clouds of the whirring fan. In their wails, a distant memory sings: stitched inside my childhood quilt, butterflies quiver in pools of the city night haze, and I lie, sleepy and safe in my creaky twin bed, inhaled 

and exhaled by the pulsating breath of immortal New York. In incomplete darkness. A mosaic of shadowed buildings painted across my walls in the dim bluish white light of the moon. Yellow rectangles glowing from the windows of living people, awake, sharing consciousness with me. And sirens—sirens, like lullabies, plunging into my cerebrospinal fluid, and swimming, syrupy, around my brain. Percussing on my eardrums, each siren patterned my little mind into slumber. On the other end of each shrieking journey, perhaps someone was joining me in sleep— permanently. 

I can’t sleep in total silence, you know—for fear it won’t stay total silence, you see. I listen too carefully to sounds that dart from ear                              to                             ear and noises that flick my tired, veiny eyes along, side                              to                             side. Is someone there? Am I alone—? So I can’t sleep—oh no, I can’t sleep, unless I’m drowning in the consistent droning of my fan. Its distortions conjure up the sounds of my safest sleeps: the sirens of someone else’s emergencies… Why is it so? Why must it be? That something so frightening can lay me at peace? 

I live inside a world of  persistent noise—like the fuzzy black and white screen on your TV that sort of buzzes and hisses—shhhhh it seems to say, and it fills my brain with static…  

Sirens sound closer now—what’s the opposite of a lullaby? A mourning song, they sing. Released from the clouded grasp of the noise around me, replaced by hands, surrounding me, wrapping me up: I’m numb, mute—. These sirens are sharp, they stab my static mind. Vibrating inside me now, flashing blue and red behind my eyelids, and it’s raining—God, isn’t there just something so nostalgic about New York City in rain—

I’m on the other end, now, of some wailing journey—and I sure do hope someone was eased peacefully into sleep by the distant, familiar sounds of the sirens that came to get me.