The City Hums Like It’s Remembering Something

There’s a rhythm beneath every city, if you listen closely enough.

It hides under train rails and neon light in footsteps that don’t hurry anywhere, in the hum that breathes between heartbeats. Tonight, it finds me.

The city hums like it’s remembering something. A low rhythm under the sodium lights, the sound of trains sighing beneath the street. I walk without meaning to following the pulse, the quiet percussion of footsteps and distant bass. Every building breathes, slow and mechanical, as if listening.

There’s a moment between the crosswalk’s blink and the night’s exhale where everything feels suspended. Even the air tastes metallic, almost blue. I think I see someone watching from across the intersection but maybe it’s just the glass,  the city’s own reflection folding in on itself.

People pass, wrapped in their own frequencies. None of us speaking, all of us transmitting. Somewhere above, a light flickers in time with the beat that isn’t playing. I stop. The silence between notes is the only thing that feels real.

The air shifts, warm wind, faint static. The city’s pulse moves through it, deliberate, like the sound of vinyl crackling before a track begins. Somewhere behind the buildings, a siren starts, then fades, as if swallowed by distance.

I walk again but the rhythm walks with me. It’s under the soles of my Chanel shoes, inside the soft neon breath of the street. Every reflection carries its own secret: my face stretched across windows, lights bending into shape, the illusion of motion even when I stand still.

I pass a narrow, half-lit alley, the kind of place that feels like it exists only between songs. A whisper of music drifts from somewhere unseen. It’s slow, downtempo, with a bassline that feels like memory. I can’t tell if it’s real or something my mind invented to fill the quiet.

Then a scent. Rain, electricity, a trace of something human.  

The kind of scent that makes you think of someone you’ve never met.

I pause again but this time the city pauses with me. Everything syncs for a breath, the lights, the hum, my pulse. For a second, I swear the night is listening back.

The air deepens, not darker, just thicker, more alive. I can almost hear the city thinking a faint resonance, too low to be music, too alive to be silence. The lights pulse in strange sync: a traffic signal, a phone glow, a window sign, all breathing together, pretending to be coincidence.   

Every reflection looks slightly wrong now. My outline bends, my jacket shifts color under each light from pale blue, then violet, then nothing. For a moment, I wonder if the city is mirroring me or if I’m what it’s dreaming of tonight.

The bassline is invisible but insistent and hums through glass, through air, through me. I close my eyes and the world doesn’t disappear, it deepens. The sound beneath everything, the one I thought was the train on Wellington St is breathing. Slow. Patient.

When I open my eyes, it’s raining  but only halfway down the street.

A car passes, its tyres whispering through puddles, a sound that anchors everything again. The rain evens out, steady, cold, falling everywhere at once. The street lights hum back into rhythm and I realise my hands are trembling, though I don’t remember why.

The alley’s music is gone or maybe it was never there. Just the wind moving through metal and wire, tuning the city into its own quiet key. I check my iPhone, no messages, no time. Only the glow of the screen reflecting my face as if the night wanted to see who was watching it.

Across the street, a café sign flickers. I think of stepping inside but something in me wants to stay out here in this thin space between the pulse and the pause. The city feels distant again, impersonal, immense yet somehow aware.

I stay there a while, watching the city breathe. The rain slows until it’s only mist, drifting in soft spirals beneath the lights. The pavement glows a film of reflected stars, caught in motion. Everything that felt heavy a moment ago starts to dissolve, like sound fading at the end of a song.

For the first time, I don’t feel separate from it, this place, this night, this quiet rhythm that lives between things. Maybe the city was never speaking to me. Maybe it was me all along, like the echo, the pulse, the frequency searching for itself.

A train door opens somewhere down the line, a hiss of air and light. I don’t move to catch it. I just listen. The sound is ordinary, grounding, but it carries something a sense that whatever I was waiting for has already passed through me.

The hum returns and gentler now, like memory settling back into silence.

I start walking again, no destination, only the rhythm of the city and my own pulse syncing for a breath, then parting ways.

And that’s enough.