The Idea That Would Not Leave

This is becoming a habit I should probably worry about: me on the balcony after dark with a blanket and a shortwave radio, listening to a buzz that has been running on 4625 kHz since before I was born, waiting - like everyone else who has ever listened to it - for the day it says something and means it.

My mother thinks the radio habit is morbid. I think it is the opposite of morbid; it is proof that something can keep going, unexplained, for decades, and that the not-knowing is not a failure so much as a permanent feature of the thing.

It was minus eight out there and the haze had shortened the courtyard to the next stairwell, which a sensible person would read as an argument against the habit. Most nights nothing happens. That is, structurally, the entire appeal.

I did not set out to write anything about this. I have just noticed I have been taking notes for the better part of a year, and that the notes have started, without my permission, to sound like the beginning of a book.