Today I walked around the city with a white noise machine. Not an app played through headphones but a box, both futuristic and antediluvian, used during nights too loud or too silent to sleep. It ran on electricity so I snuck into my dad’s garage and took his generator, zipping it into a duffle bag and slotting my arms through the straps.

Then, I carried it around the city looking for you.

It rumbled against my spine, and I felt touched for the first time since your impression faded from that side of my bed. The soft whir distracted me from your high-rising, staccato accent, the one you explained as particular to your side of the Port. Despite the distance you traveled to arrive, were it not for the machine, I’d have heard you everywhere.

For five hours I covered as many streets as I could, wondering what a generator ran on and where I could get it. Diesel, gasoline, propane, or natural gas, the Internet said, and I was reassured that I could split the cement and fill it when I needed.

Only later did I wonder what I’d say if I saw you, how I’d explain the machines, how it would feel to form the words in my mouth where they no longer belonged only to me.

At other times, I wished the rumbling on my back were a jetpack and that I could take to the sky to seek out the part in your hair that I’d memorized as your head lay across my chest.

When the generator stopped, my ears were flooded with flowing liquid voices, and disoriented, as if awakening suddenly in a hotel room, I was reminded that it was Monday afternoon, that you were at the office, many blocks from anywhere I’d been searching.

If, however unlikely, I had found you where you weren’t supposed to be. If, instead of at your desk, I saw you on the street, then what else that I had accepted as true might be any other way?

– Sam Simon