A Wall

I live in a little one bedroom apartment. I painted it before I moved in last year. Hung on the walls are some traditional Korean prints I picked up in Iteawan before I moved back home. My bookshelf is over flowing with books, though unlike 10 years ago, today, all the books on my shelf are books that I have actually read. My grandfather's recliner sits in the living room. My grandmother gave it to me last year after he died. I don't sit in it much probably because I feel like it is still his. Most of my time is spent in front of my computer. That is where I do all of my work. I have 3 computers for work. The wires are everywhere. Seeing those cables and wires makes me anxious and I day dream about a time when I can get rid of it all and never have to deal with tangled wires again.

My apartment is pressed up against the freeway--I-5. The noise of it is ever present. Sometimes, while on my front porch, I think about all the people whizzing by and where they are going and where they are coming from. The freeway has energy: a blend of people and machines. If you walk just one street over the noise disappears. But I live in the energy of the freeway. It has a voice like the ocean. I am so used to it that I sometimes forget about it. Then on nights like tonight, after teaching my online class, I go outside and there is a lull in the traffic. For just a few moments it is silent. I wish the silence would last but just then another car speeds by and breaks the silence.

The state has built a sound barrier, a tall cement wall to block the sound--to contain the energy. When I stand on my porch I see the wall. And there is a door in the wall. I am not sure who has the key, but sometimes I think about opening that door. I day-dream that the door in the wall is a doorway to some other secret land. A place just beneath and to the side of this land.

Very few people walk or drive down this street. It is the boundary between the city and the highway. Though I live in the middle of the city, this street feels like a frontier. The wall is the border between the real world and the sideways world.

I can't explain the wall very well or what it feels like to live near it but I wonder if the wires that are all tangled under my desk are connected to the feeling of the wall in someway.