The singing starts before dawn.
Four or five in the morning, when the alley is still dark and narrow and holding its breath. The houses face each other across a strip of concrete barely wide enough for two motorbikes to pass without touching. Sound has nowhere to go here. It hits walls and comes back.
She throws her doors open and sings.
She is about twenty, maybe. I know she has a neurological condition—people say it quietly, with the tone that means explanation and permission at the same time. We have spoken before, in small ways—offering snacks, simple questions, asking what she is doing—but nothing that bridges the distance between us. Her singing is not a song. It is clapping, sharp and rhythmic, hands striking hands again and again. It is shouting that does not form words. It is her calling for her mother, or maybe not her mother, maybe just a sound she needs to release. It comes out wrong. It always comes out wrong.
It fills the alley. It enters bedrooms. It sits on the chest.
Some mornings I wake up already furious. Other mornings I wake up trying to be patient, reminding myself that she cannot help it, that no one is choosing this. Both versions of me fail. I lie there listening, counting claps, counting breaths, waiting for it to stop. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it pauses, then starts again, louder, closer, as if the sound itself is searching for a way inside my body.
I imagine myself shouting back. Just one time. Just one word. Stop. But I don’t. I never do. Calling the police would do nothing. Everyone knows this. She is sick. This is not a crime. There is no solution that does not turn me into a monster.
By mid-morning, the second kind of noise arrives.
Next door to her house is a scrap collection business. Every few days a truck pulls up, and metal rains down into its open mouth. The sound is blunt and heavy—iron against iron, a low, hollow thudding that shakes the ground. Men laugh. Women arrive with bags and bundles, their voices high and overlapping. Someone shouts numbers. Someone argues. The truck bed fills, piece by piece, with things that used to be something else.
This noise belongs to daytime labor. It is not considered a problem. Everyone agrees it is acceptable. Nothing can be done.
I try to tell myself that this noise is different, that it serves a purpose, that it belongs to work and survival. I fail at this too. The sound doesn’t care what I call it. It crashes and repeats and crashes again. It enters the same narrow alley, finds the same walls, comes back the same way.
There are days I put on headphones and play music I don’t want to hear just to cover what I can’t escape. There are days I sit in silence and let the noise win. There are days I count the hours until evening, when the truck leaves and the alley quiets, briefly, like a body that has stopped struggling but hasn’t yet rested.
And then there is the third kind of noise.
This one has no sound at all.
I have been unemployed for months. My days stretch long and shapeless. I stay home because there is nowhere else to go. I listen because there is nothing else to listen to. The noise inside my chest grows slowly, accumulating like pressure behind a wall. It does not clap or shout or crash. It hums. It asks questions it already knows the answers to. How long will this last. What are you doing with your life. How many days can repeat like this.
Sometimes, when the girl across the alley is singing and the scrap truck is unloading at the same time, something rises in me so fast it scares me. Rage, sharp and bright. I want everything to stop. I want silence like a physical thing I can hold. I want to scream back, louder, more human, just to prove that I still can.
Instead, I sit still.
I think about how none of this is anyone’s fault and how that makes it worse. There is no villain here. There is illness and work and a city packed too tightly with lives pressed together. There is a narrow alley that amplifies everything. There is me, caught in the middle, with nothing to offer except endurance.
The sounds layer themselves day after day. Morning singing. Afternoon metal. Evening quiet that never fully arrives. At night, when the alley finally rests, the noise inside me does not. It replays everything I didn’t say, everything I couldn’t do. It asks how long I can keep swallowing this without choking.
Some weeks are better than others. Some mornings the singing is softer, shorter. Some days the truck doesn’t come. On those days, I almost believe this will pass.