Murmur

There are strange, lucid mornings, X tells me, when it’s as if he sees all his things anew, like when he first moved into his flat. An uncanny silence descends on everything, he says, like an interruption… He drinks his tea, leaves the flat and slowly the world’s white noise returns, a vanishing, approaching static that sweeps away the dream of silence. An eternal murmur that beckons him through the city like a foreigner and merges with its noises and shouts, with the rippling of leaves and the cooing of pigeons, with all the city’s signs and disorders. It doesn’t make him feel any more at home, he says, far from it. It moves in and out of his own voice, inside and outside, close and distant — is it you, he says, is it your murmur?