I have habit of keeping the fan on when I sleep. Or maybe I should say I need the fan on while I try to sleep. The white noise is like a conditioned staple, as important and thoughtless as closing my eyes.

It’s also necessary to keep pesky mosquitoes away, power-cuts mean I awake to incessant drones of driving bombing blood suckers. I did notice that there weren’t so many of them this season and decided to try seeing if I could manage without the noise.

All too soon my ears drifted, suddenly attuned to all the noise of the neighborhood. The dim scenery began to sound out the faceless void around my house. The muffled murmurings on peoples T.V’s was, unfortunately, more clear than any gossip. The clanking, clattering and dings of vessels was surprising. It seems like my neighbors like to cook all the way to midnight.

There was a general pattern to it all, one voice would go out from one house and then another. The simple body of the night was marked with many faces before they fell into groups. It was tempting to believe it was some disjointed rehearsal, the chorus heralding the silence in my room being assembled into a living thing. When a bike zipped past, the curtain fell, the void magically deformed with applause.

I put the fan back on, because I wasn’t going to get any sleep with all that noise.