Night Feeding

Blackness all around. No light at all. In the background, the white noise of the fan swirls and eddies with the rhythm of my mother’s breathing, providing a kind of foundation for her breaths. She pauses, sets herself again, and starts a new riff. This one louder, more deeply felt, more insistent. I struggle to find a comfortable position, moving side to side. It’s not easy for me. I have to work hard to move at all. Moving is difficult. I strain, I arch my back, I stretch my arms outward into the darkness until I can no longer see them. I struggle to find a comfortable position.

I add my voice to the song, to the bass line of the fan and the insistent tempo set by my mother’s breathing.

“Eeep,” I cry out in the darkness.

“Eeep,” I add my soprano voice soaring above the rhythm section.

I am the soloist. I am a trumpet player weaving a brassy and dangerous line high above the rhythm section, trying the very top of my range. I’m Ella Fitzgerald, scatting my way around the swirl of rhythms below. I’m floating on a little raft of my own making coursing along the waters of the night sounds.
I’m ad libbing. I don’t know where this is all going. I’m on a tightrope with no net below, a tiny flying Wallenda. The rhythm section follows along, sustaining my line, following the random course I’m setting. A random walk, where the next note is just as likely to be higher as it is lower. Or a random walk with drift, only the drift is in volume. I’m starting to feel my voice now, to warm my chops. I’m drifting from piano to forte. I’m drifting from largo to presto. The path itself is uncertain with many switchbacks and rests along the way, but I’m feeling, I’m getting the drift.

I can hear my own heart beating in the background, creating a counterpoint, a syncopation, with the rest of the rhythm section.

“Eeep.”

Maybe it’s not that I’m adding my voice to the song, to my mother’s rhythmic breathing. To the inhale-exhale-inhale inexorability of my mother’s breathing. Maybe it’s echolocation, like bats do. It’s dark in here, much too dark for me to see in struggling to find a comfortable position. Maybe I can echolocate, use my voice to find boundaries, to define perimeters, to find comfort.

Maybe I can hear the vibrations bounce off the sides of my bassinet, bounce off the gentle breathing of my mother, swirl around in a kind of Gaussian blur in the complex vortices of the fan. Maybe that’s what I can do.

“Eeep.”

I’m hungry now. I wasn’t sure before, but now I’m definitely hungry. I’ve echo located off myself, self-echolocation. My sonic blasts bounce inside as well as out and come back amplified. They bounce around the echo chamber of my empty stomach and come back amplified. I’m hungry.

“Aaah”

A louder and more sustained blast just to be sure. Distantly it comes back from all parts of the darkened room, but this is a slow freight train compared to the express train delivering the message from my stomach. Pony express compared to the jangled vectors and bit of information coursing along at light speed over the information superhighway.

“AAAAAAH,” the stomach message hits the reply key.

I’m definitely hungry.