The Turning of Wheels

Maria’s life felt negligible at best staring out the window of her second floor apartment at all the other replicated buildings just like her own, and she spent hours in lustful curiosity about the goings on inside the other tenants homes; wondered what secrets were held behind stately green doors and twelve paned windows. The neighbors were of the keep to themselves type, and often Maria only saw or heard their children playing in the grassy courtyard, or up and down the wide looping road that encircled the complex; the sound of wheels on pavement (bicycles, skateboards, roller blades) could always be heard and she mourned the day that those frictional tones would not be included in the arsenal of white noise she relied on daily. Today, Maria felt sadder than she had ever before, sitting in her black leather computer chair, as there seemed to be a deeper emptiness in her vigil than days previous, and she wanted winter to shoulder this burden, to take the blame, but she could not bring herself to accuse him. Her life had slowly been drained of unwanted noise and time vacuums—the sound of sports constantly on the television, the opening and closing of the porch door in the middle of the night when he snuck out for cigarettes, the raucous quality of his snoring, and his groans of obesity and aging that made her grit her teeth and beg for acts of attrition. He had taken those things with him when he left their apartment for good, when Maria had messily torn at his heart with her fingers, fracturing the long years of their marriage together; fracturing the miles of sadness she held inside over the decade of their accumulation. She traded his noise laden presence for the solitude of the world just happening moment to moment, with its quiet deaths and births that went unseen by most, except by Maria who recorded them with her eyes and ears from the dim room at the back of the building on the second floor from the creaking black chair, and she waited for a sign or some tiny acknowledgement to validate her own existence. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Six Sentences 3/08