What I Hear

As I lay in my bed in my Harlem apartment, I hear almost the same sounds outside my open window every morning. It's always a mixture of sounds that soothe me, and sounds that disturb me, sometimes waking me up. I hear birds chirping and cars driving by, creating a swooshing sound which is not that different from the sound of the ocean. I also hear the beeping of the garbage truck mixed with the yelling of the garbage men and people on the street. There is a couple fighting loudly on the street, and a woman, who stands in the alley right below my window, has her cell phone on speaker while she has a mundane conversation, all I hear is "uh huh" and "yup" from her end of the conversation. The design of my building must bounce sound pretty far because I am on the fourth floor and I can almost make out what the person on the phone is saying, they are talking fast, but I cannot quiet tell if it is a man or a woman. I hear a plane fly by every couple of minutes, the sound of it overpowers everything else, almost like the rest of the world is muted in comparison to its vibration. I hear cars beeping at each other, adding to the hostile environment that the people arguing have created. Every couple of minutes, it's almost silent, I just hear the birds and the occasional car passing by, as if the people arguing had left, and the woman had hung up the phone, but the silence ends and it's clear that the people are still there, and the woman had just walked into the building for a minute. Far away, in the park down the street I hear a man call out for his friend "Johnny", "Johnny", but nobody replies, he is the only one I hear in the park.