The sound of not quite silence

The girl who lives across the hall from me snores. It’s an impressive snore, not of the variety that softly lulls you to sleep with a sound like ocean waves rolling into shore. This snore is loud. This snore is heard when my door is closed and her door is closed and I’m lying in my bed which puts my head in the farthest place away from her door across from the hall. In the beginning of the year I would lie in my bed and curse the person next to me for having the bellowing snore I could only imagine coming out of some sort of large animal – an elephant or a hippo perhaps. But one day while making my way back from the bathroom on my way to rest in the arms of whatever god controls sleep I realized that the sound was coming from farther away than I thought – across the hall instead of on the other side of the wall. I stopped being annoyed over the long low noise instead being impressed that such a sound could travel all that way. I hear it every night. And I just smile and laugh to myself over the sheer intensity of the snore – and wonder whether I should leave an anonymous box of Breathe-Rights.