Today a car was flipped over in front of an elementary school, blocking the only road out of the neighbourhood.
And crowds gathered, as crowds always do. Never all in one place, but three or four together, some here, some across the street. All of us watching as if we knew how to help, how to quicken the process. All of us watching as if there was anything any of us could do. People got out of their cars, their trucks, their vans to stand in twenty-degree weather and watch the tow-truck slowly tip the car back over. A car on the other side of the road must have been hit; it’s back left tire twisted and jutted out from under the wheel well—like a leg broken and bent in the fibula—and completely flat, the rim alone left to bear the weight of the trunk and backseats. A second truck waited down a side street, a carrion bird biding its time to pick up the bones of the broken sedan.
I sat for nearly an hour before the trucks came; people were there before me who idled longer. I couldn’t help but think how different and how much the same this was as the city that I miss so much. There doesn’t seem as much to write about here—there, something was always happening, whether celebratory or tragic. Something was always sparking these hands and fingers to itch for pen and paper. Here, aside from this morning, all is quiet on the northern front. There is no pulse here, no living, breathing city that wakes and sleeps and dreams around me.
Or, maybe I’m being too harsh, too quick to judge, too reminiscing. Perhaps the pulse here is just softer and quieter, and takes a keener ear to hear, a firmer touch to feel beneath the skin.
I don’t know if I want to find this suburban heartbeat, instead of marking the days until the urge to fly south for the winter that roars through the blood in my ears and the breath in my lungs has the chance to be appeased.
