At first there was silence…he sat there in the quiet of night…’round three in the mornin’…tryin’ hard to hear somethin’…a car go by on the boulevard outside his window…the train wailin’ downtown…some alley cat in need of a fix…short sounds…brief noises interupting his stillness…he longed not to be lonely…

And he looked ’round his room at bare walls…a plant in need of water…dusty old pennies on a counter top…a butcher’s knife he’d gotten from his mom’s kitchen when she passed…various notes and bills…receipts and letters loosely piled in a stack…a bottle of aspirin…these were his possessions…

When he was married things were kept in order…not such a mess ’round the place…books placed on shelves…dirty clothes put in a basket…tables were dusted…coffee pot cleaned…she kept things in order…too much order…even pens were stored away in drawers next to pads of paper to write lists upon…grocery lists…chores to be done…days marked on calendars with events scribbled on them…church picnic on the 27th…Good Friday coming up later in April…a cousin’s birthday on the 18th…he no longer kept track of such things…days just ran into each other…night time turning to morn too quickly…he dreaded seeing the sun…

But for now it was night time…it was quiet…too quiet…this room was silent…filled with nothing but items he’d collected from the road…travels all over the U.S. …a rosary from a monk in the Bronx…a Bible given to him from a street preacher in Pittsburgh…a copy of Ulysses he’d picked up in a bookstore out West…old Greyhound bus tickets to Cincinnati…Chicago…New Orleans…a bottle of whiskey given to him by an old lover…that’s all he had in this room were memories…they kept him awake at night in the silence…

This room…this room…was his home…