My roof was mostly replaced today. There is a bit, the only stretch of roof actually visible to me, that remains only partly finished. It seems such a small thing to be left incomplete, like an afterthought or something forgotten rather than work deliberately left until later, but I am not privvy to the minds of these roofers. I could only begin to guess why anything happened the way it did today, and it would all be me grasping at figments of my imagination and incidental observations. I did not speak to them. They did not speak to me. I barely even observed their work, instead measuring their progress in the tromp of feet above me, the grinding hum of an air compressor somewhere out of sight, the staccato five-beat pattern of their nail guns, and the occasional appearance of a worker using my balcony as a staging ground for moving materials from the ground to the roof. This happened twice–my day interrupted by the expected knock at the door and an apologetic smile from a man who probably would have felt more comfortable climbing a ladder to use my balcony rather than being told to move through the apartment building, and I still do not understand why it had to happen this way. I didn’t mind the interruption. It wasn’t like I was doing any deep or focused work, distracted as I was by the constant noise of their activity and the rattle of my apartment building as an unknown number of men walked across my roof. It was just odd, this strange set of circumstances that led to me being home all day and my brief, wordless interactions with this poor, uncomfortable roofer. None of my neighbors interracted with the roofers at all. Only me. And even then, all I did was open a door for the roofer and then lock it behind him once he was finished passing sheets of plywood up to his coworkers. It was as distant a remove as could be possible when your roof is being replaced and your balcony is needed as a halfway point for passing materials up.

My best guess is that the slope of the ground, uneven at the best of times, would have made for treacherous ladder work. The one bit of their work I observed clearly was them placing a ladder at the start of the day. I’d been up early, preparing myself for whatever home invasion my landlord had been unable to specify (which seems like a real failing on his part, if I’m being honest), so I could not stop myself from opening my blinds to look outside when I finally heard voices. It took them a few tries to find a viable spot, each attempt further and further from the parking lot they’d claimed for their supplies and vehicles, but the first spot they seemed comfortable with was past the entire stretch of my apartment, so I am guessing that the ground was not suitable for any other ladder, even a shorter one. That said, they did eventually move the first ladder so it was right in front of my kitchen window, preventing me from opening my blinds, so maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe they were focused on something else that I could not see from within the structure they’d be working on. I’ll never know, now, since they are mostly done and I do not have it in me to ask. My curiousity is strong, but it is not stronger than my desire for silence and peace after eleven solid hours of banging, rattling, thunking, and rumbling. They have been done for six hours now–they wrapped up their work as night fell, cleaning up the last few things in preparation for tomorrow in the mixed glow of the streetlight and the parking lot flood lights–but I can still hear the noises every time I close my eyes. That’s why I’m writing this now: my attempts at sleep have all met with failure as the phantom noises from hours ago jolt me away every time I start to fall asleep and I am hoping that I can excise this demon by writing about it.

The constant low-grade anxiety of my day, of attempting to work and play beneath the constant noise of roof replacement while listening for a knock on my apartment door, has left me unsettled. It was not that difficult to ignore in the moment, but the noises didn’t really resemble things from my past until night fell, the noises faded, and my mind began to reproduce them in the mixed, false reality way of the half-dreams that appear as you are drifting off to sleep. Then it was all to easy to hear the stomp of angry feet, the indistinct shouting of my brother and parents fighting, and the acts of destruction that followed those arguments. My peace and attempts at focus, broken throughout the day by intermittent shouting in Spanish and the sounds of construction, were completely shattered when I finally tried to sleep because I could not filter out noises that weren’t really there. I could only attempt to remind myself, as I was startled awake again and again, that these noises were nothing to be afraid of and that they’d fade in time, just like all my dreams of a world reduced to the grid-map out of a strategy game eventually end when I’ve played too much Fire Emblem. Reminding myself that the noises weren’t actually happening has never helped, especially not when I’d spent eleven straight hours with them as the dominating soundscape of my life. They all felt too real in my half-asleep state for that reassurance to ever mean much.

I can feel myself growing tired enough that the noises might not matter any more. It is late, after all, and I really need to try again since they will be back at it tomorrow: finishing whatever part of my building’s roof wasn’t completed today and starting on the roof across the parking lot that all but one of my windows face. They will start at a reasonable time for a Friday and an unreasonable time for a Saturday, so I will be forced awake at some point no matter how hard I try to ignore it. I will see if they forget this small section of roof or just left it for later. I will find out, as I watch them work across the lot, if they place their ladders based on the ground or something on the roof. I will attempt to glean whatever information I can in order to satisfy my curiosity and finally be able to put an action to the noise I spent all of today hearing. Hopefully that visual will be enough for me to sleep more easily tomorrow night–I’m going to need it given how late it already is right now and how early I expect to be woken up. Still, even as tired as I am, I can still hear the mental echo of the noise they made tearing through my mind as it advises senseless fear and precautions for something that isn’t even truly present. Maybe I will turn up the music that plays while I sleep. Maybe I’ll leave a little bit of light going in my room so I can see that I’m no longer in my parents’ home should these ghost sounds startle me awake. I don’t know what will help. Maybe all I needed was to write it down: examine these thoughts and cast them out, onto the page, to clear my mind of the intermittent disruption of fake, half-remembered sounds. I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow [it helped, but it did not fix things. I had to get through a bad night’s sleep for things to change for the better].