A Summer Night, With the Window Half Open

On summer nights, I never open the window all the way, or close it all the way either. Shut it, and the room turns so quiet I can't sleep; throw it wide, and the summer outside pushes straight into the room. So I leave it exactly half open. Half might look like an in-between, unsure of itself, but to me it's a way of keeping the inside and the outside close at once. Somewhere between today and tomorrow, between noise and quiet.

Through a window left half open

Leave it half open and the wind coming from far off, someone's late footsteps, the hum of an air-conditioner unit from some apartment all drift in together. I love that vague, in-between noise. Nothing about it is sharp, so I don't have to strain to listen. Daytime noise keeps nagging at me to do something, but these night sounds ask for nothing. They just keep me company. The footsteps fade before I notice, the unit hums on low, the wind puffs the curtain up once and lets it settle back down. If I sit still in the middle of it all, the tautness my heart carried all day loosens, little by little. On top of these sounds — not complete silence, not complete clamor — one song settles just right. Too quiet and the song floats off alone; too loud and it gets buried.

One voice, two instruments

On nights like this I don't put on anything big. The day was already loud enough. A song with the volume up fills the room, sure, but it doesn't suit a half-open window. It smothers all the little sounds leaking in from outside. Instead I pick a song that's about one voice and two instruments. A song with plenty of space, where there's still room to breathe between one sound and the next.

Something like the voice on the new song Lee Sora released after seven years — a voice that holds a single syllable long and won't let it go. When it stretches one note out, unhurried, it feels like there's an emotion still pooled inside it that hasn't become words yet. And so I end up filling that empty space with my own today. Maybe a good night song isn't one that tells you everything, but one that leaves a space for you to fill in. A song like that comes down slowly, all the way inside, even at a low volume. If a quiet winter-night song is like a thick blanket, a quiet summer-night song is more like the half-open window. It doesn't wrap you up completely; it leaves just that much breeze.

Turning the temperature down a few degrees

Music is sometimes like a thermostat. It takes a day that ran hot and lowers it a few degrees, sets it to a temperature you can get through tomorrow on. It doesn't hand you some grand comfort; it just cools the heat of right now by a hand's width. Maybe what we need isn't a fine solution but exactly those few degrees that get us through tonight. Not the room's temperature — the heart's. Tonight, one song like that is enough.

Listening to summer cool down slowly outside the window, I put this one on. That a vow to forget it all could be spoken this softly — on a summer night, that lands like a small mercy. So tonight I'll keep the volume low and let this song drift, a promise to forget carried off as gently as a 'Summer Breeze'.