Sounds of New York City

To me New York City is associated with a constant barrage of sounds. My heater makes a racket at least once an hour for ten minutes while it spews and spits steam to warm my room enough that I have the window open even in January. When the heater isn’t making a racket, my fridge is buzzing and thrumming.

This is not to mention the sounds that come from outside. Sirens are a constant (though blessedly not between 10pm-7am for some reason). And loudest are the garbage men who come twice a day (some times) and bring with them sounds of yelling, the whirring of the truck and banging that all carry to my ninth floor room. They can come any time between 7 or 8 in the morning and often spur me to go work out earlier than I might have to get away from the noise.

At night, between my heater and fridge there is constant noise while I sleep. One night when I lay awake in my bed, I suddenly realized that the room was completely quiet. No sounds coming from outside, no heater spitting and no fridge thrumming. I ran away to Finland over break chasing this very silence (admittedly, New York cannot compete with Finland for silence) but when my room was so quiet my only thought was “What if the heater’s broken?”.

Sometime this past week though, I noticed a different sound in my room. A sound that seemed to be coming from my kitchen and could only be described as scratching. Yet during the day I could never hear the sound and when I checked my cabinets at night there was nothing unusual. So my worrying mind jumped to termites: I imagined termites burrowing deep in the wood and having my cabinet bottom collapse one day becasue of their tunneling. When I ran this theory by my parents my mother immediately said it wasn’t possible.

Just as I was starting to think that perhaps I needed to have someone look into what the cause was, I heard the sound again, but this time it sounded like the rustling of a bag. There’s only one cabinet that contains bags so I went straight to it and opened it with more than a little trepidation. As much as I wanted to know what it was, I was scared of what I would find (my worst fear was be finding something dead, or that flew in my face).

Confirming that the sound was indeed coming from the cabinet, I decided to search my room for stick to rustle the bag. Unsuccessful, I went back to the cabinet and at that precise moment, I saw the source of the rustling and scratching.

A mouse. A cute, adorable, tiny mouse. And so I screamed and promptly shut the cabinet door.