Quiet

"Feels like the end of the world." - John Mayer

I woke up this morning and felt an unfamiliar sound blaring outside my window, the world around me. I drew back the drapes to check if today is a Sunday rather than the initial Monday. Later, I would check my laptop's clock to see if it is indeed Monday. On Sundays, the roads would bear fewer cars flying by and the streets would be lonelier without Uni students going to class but for weekly grocery shoppings.

The first autumn winds finally swept past the skies, blowing off the last femininity of April, making room for the chilly heart of May. I woke up with a morning chill nibbling my skin. Even the warm comforter felt cold. May came into the room uninvited. May made the trees dance gleefully. Yet deceivingly, May kept April's sunburns and blue blue skies. Ah, how unpredictable the weather has gotten. It would require one to leave house with clothing accessories of all seasons. Shades. Sunblock. Scarf. Umbrella. Slippers or shoes. Skirt or jeans. Little petty indecisions of vanity.

For the past few days - weeks, perhaps - even the tiniest sounds would irritate me. My housemate's vibrating footsteps to the kitchen so many times echoing beneath me on the wooden floorboards. Her quite intentions I knew not of by the counter figuring out her long winded thoughts again and again. My landlady's husband's truck backing out of the "driveway" just outside my bedroom, the old metals screeching at a top pitch. And the rusty gates opening and closing above my head. The construction suddenly erected just outside my window due to reasons I could not quite understand. (Why did they have the sudden urge to dig up the sidewalk and flip the soil and restore everything back again). The cruel banging and drilling and hammering that cut short my beauty sleep at 10AM. It is still too early for me. And at night, the crazy screams and shrieks of my faceless neighbours. The sounds come from everywhere and obviously drunk, but I cannot find them. I cannot see them. They hide so professionally in the dark. Occasionally, booming ching-chong-chang's would walk past under my window. This year, Brisbane has been disturbingly populated by people from the Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan... The annoying muffled cars racing down my street because it is fun, their turbine exhaustions let off like farts would in drunken manly farting competitions. Vroooom-psst. Vrooom-psst. Vrooom-psst. I cannot recall hearing these little fizzes last year. Have I gotten more sensitively alert.

But this morning. My housemate was out earlier than my waking hour. The construction outside has stopped, the men merely sitting around chitchatting in their glow-in-the-dark(-and-day) uniforms. The cars drive past the main road in an under-radar buzz. It was just this intangible peace lingering.

There is something peculiarly quiet about today's Monday. Yes, it is indeed a Monday.