silence

I've been here alone for about a week, and it's starting to get to me. I'm starting to get overemotional and spend waaaay too much time in front of the computer. Luckily, Anna's getting back tomorrow. Yay!!! But anyway, I've been having a lot of time to think about random stuff, and for some reason this has been coming back to me a lot. It kind of reminds me of how ambivalent I feel here sometimes in the city, like I can't decide whether to love it here or hate it and leave.
Maybe a month or six weeks ago, we were riding a train somewhere, I can't remember where, and it was snowing really hard. It was the nice kind, with the big puffy flake clumps that drift all over and softly land on you, not the nasty hard kind that tries to abrade your corneas. Anyway, as we were riding, the lights in our car kept flickering out. I feel like it was quiet, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because I also remember that nobody changed their tone or said anything when the light went on or off. It was like we were all ignoring it, trying not to let on that we had noticed anything different. I think I just remember it being quiet because the outside gets so quiet when it snows like that, like the flakes are soaking up all the sound. We were sitting right by a window, and it was so beautiful. The sky was that reddish color that city skies turn when the cloud cover is really low, so we could see everything really clearly, and the snow was falling really thickly everywhere. It was so beautiful, sitting there in the dark. It was moment where I loved where I was, and I could recognize that as it was happening. I don't know, it just really got to me. That's why I feel so torn here, because there are so many days where I feel like this is just another big dirty city with too much poverty and racism, and then sometimes I just think it's so beautiful and it's amazing that we all live here without killing each other.