By Ariel Barley

This big, big feeling sounds like my windchime.


Thop.

There is a pipe above the shower in my newish apartment, and it leaks sometimes. For a few weeks, I barraged maintenance with a series of emails bemoaning this fact — playing at a germaphobe so that I could have a response when people heard the leak from my room.

“They’re getting it fixed,” I would say, annoyed at our building staff. “And it’s taking forever, ugh.”

But now I’m at that point in the whirlwind of a semester where my room is uninhabitable. To save face, I close the door whenever I’m not in it — and I’m almost to the point where I will lock it whenever I leave, fearful that Cecily will poke into my bathroom to steal a tampon and see the worst of me — as if she doesn’t already know.

Clothes from outfits gone by decorate my rug. My laundry remains undone, my desk untouched, unused. The whole of my room suffocates me in these phases (until I find it in myself to dedicate a precious, fleeting night to cleaning), but I cannot find myself to leave because of my bed, and I cannot find myself caring about a stupid shower leak when my room looks like shit. I would rather lay.

A friend once told me that I nest, and the thought never really left me.

I came from a messy house — one where my parents never made their beds or picked up their clothes off the floor, or ever washed all of the dishes. Instead, my dad dedicated the early, bed-making moments of his morning to his favorite acoustic guitar, strumming me awake as my mom sang along in a private little morning prayer. My dog would bark loud, and our creaky house would rumble with the heavy, sleep-deprived footsteps of my unclean, but un-sad family. I would listen, and curl three blankets and four pillows around me until they made me feel content enough to get up. I do the same thing now — just to the sounds of cars and trucks creaking by.

The sentiment behind my bed-non-making remains the same in college: Why ruin my perfectly curated “nest” by trying to be the type of girl who makes her bed? Why waste the precious seconds of my morning where I can hear my shower leak and think about dying and not have to get up?

My bed is usually my comfort, but today my skin is so dry  like cardboard. I can hear the leak from my bed-perch, and I feel like the whole world can tell I’ve been crying. (That’s another thing: when I nest, I cry). The sound of it lulls me, and not in a good way anymore. I am wallowing, and my bed is not enough to get me normal.

After hours of this — thop-thop, silence, silence, thop — Garrett and Cecily enter the apartment. Cecily has a higher voice, and Garrett’s is low when he’s feeling comfortable. Their voices mix into easy chatter, soft and breezy. This is enough to rouse me, enough to quiet the leak for a bit as I move my body into the other room, to say hello, to make them look at me and my body well-nested.

I grab a candle from the TV stand. Apple Orchard — one of Cecily’s. The sticker has cartoonish apples with smiley faces strewn across it. I picture one of them, frowning.

Garrett stops me before I can light it. He’s probably over for homework, or a movie..

“Can I trim the wick?” he asks. (I wonder if he can even tell that something's wrong, or if maybe he really does just want to trim the wick.)

He says this every time I need to light a candle, in the same exact tone, with the exact same timing. Something about it feels like the start of a routine. Gare snips the wick with whatever pair of scissors he can get his hands on, and his fancy little lighter bzzts to life. Soon, someone will make tea — be it Gare, or Cecily in the other room. The kettle will shhhh into our cold kitchen.

I feel calm — at least the early wigglings of it. I feel a phantom wrench in my hand, and I don’t even want to beat myself over the head with it. I want to fix a leak, but not more than I want my head pillowed by Gare’s thigh — as close as he’ll let me get. Later, then — I’ll fix it later.

***

A girl who I don’t really know that well has a windchime in her room, and I just can’t stop looking at it.

“He yelled at me this week. Like, really yelled at me. Like, if he does it again I’m breaking up with him.”

Aubrey talks endlessly, hastily, like she can’t help it. It’s nice, albeit redundant most of the time. I like the background chatter for these nail appointments. That’s why I keep coming here with a hasty Pinterest moodboard and an even hastier coffee, despite the forty-five minute drive. And, sometimes, I really do like to give advice on girls’ evil boyfriends. They — straight girls, and also bi girls — seem to love me for this role, like I exude some sort of passive almost-lesbianism that flags me as a worthy and unbiased boyfriend-confidant. I like feeling like a confidant, so.

I place my hand under the UV lamp as Aubrey continues her spiel.

“He’s just so loud,” she says, raising her voice over the whirr of the lamp. “It’s so much, for someone quiet like me. Hand.”

I give her my hand, and I open my mouth to say “you should break up with him” again, but what comes out instead is:

“Where did you get that windchime?”

Aubrey seems startled, like she doesn’t immediately know what I’m talking about. I can’t fathom that she might’ve forgotten the windchime. It has spun leisurely for this entire session, emitting tiny dinks that weave between the flow of Aubrey’s incessant chatter and my customary hmms and ahhs. Like: ahh-dink, dink-hmm, ahh-dink-dink. I reason that maybe for her it might blend in, but for me, the visitor, I cannot look away — cannot stop hearing. I want to rip it from her ceiling and hang it above my bed. I want to put the orange plates that make the dink noises between my teeth and crunch on them like rock candy.

“Oh, that. It’s nice, right? My mom got it for me.” She motions at the lamp, and then at her TV, and then her two old, rattling cats who breathe so, so loud. And then, shockingly, to herself.  “It drowns out the noise.”

***

In Freshman year, my dancer friend London asks me if I want to go two-stepping. I laugh and tell her that for all my life in Texas, I’ve never been a dancer like that. She laughs back, like a tinkling, scheming little fairy, and I quickly find myself in a mirrored gym room with a pair of cowboy boots I haven't worn in five years.

As London dips me left and right and spins me, I curse the awkwardness of my limbs.

“Just follow me,” she says, like it’s that easy — because to her, it is. Her pink speaker vibrates with the synth-prickling intro of a song off the newly released Midnights. Frustration festers in my chest, ugly.

“I think I’m just bad at this,” I eventually say, after I’ve nearly fallen. What I mean is: I cannot bear to be bad at this in front of you anymore.

I think that she can sense my unease, so she directs me to sit while she dances solo. I watch as the music shifts into something slower, hypnotic — maybe Caroline Polachek?

She is beautiful and tiny, and her red hair bounces with her graceful movements. She points her toes even in her sparkly cowboy boots, which I know is informed by years of classical ballet. She once saw the arch of my foot and proclaimed her jealousy. Now, watching her, I cannot imagine what she would have to be jealous of. Her boots create a rhythm. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap. Repeat.

Idly, I think of boys on tables at frats — of the bars I’ve snuck into with my fake ID. I think my girlfriends in highschool filming themself doing a viral dance that feels more like a series of movements. I think of my mom, who wanted to be a dancer but had me instead. I think of my feet, which are perfect for ballet.

“Anyone can dance.” Even when London says it — chipper and as we walk out of the dance room —  I don’t believe her. I do, however, listen to the tap of my shoes as I walk.

Later, a girl will stare quizzically at the cowboy boots I’ve dragged into the gay club and ask me why I’m wearing them. I do not say that I am from Texas. I do not even say it’s for fashion, because it’s not. I prattle off something about how they tap-tap-tap. What I don’t say: that I am a bad dancer, but I really love to dance.

***

Gare has an assignment for a photography class: what does home look like to you? He takes a picture of the pennant flags in our living room. I don’t have a nice camera, but I think of my four apartments in four years — the way my posters have been the same from my dorm to my two-by-two. I reason that, for me, it cannot merely be a place.

It cannot be a merely person, either. I think of my dad, a musician. I think of my mom, a singer. I think of my brother and his school choir, and the way he breathes louder than anyone I’ve ever met because he’s hard of hearing. I think of screaming at him in our youth — of repeating myself twenty times in our adulthood. When I close my eyes, looking for comfort in nothingness and pondering home, I ask myself — I must ask myself — what does it sound like?

I hear boot-tapping and candle-wicking and circling the drain. I hear a windchime like a mobile and a Tamagotchi wheedling for breakfast in my youth. It all sounds like —

bells. ■