Sound barrier
First it was the people, with their yammering, with their jabs and petty squabbles. Leaving them behind was no big deal, considering how little I interacted with them anyway. And I took it slow, stopped asking folks at work how they were or about their weekends, about their perfect children. I didn’t make eye contact when I walked the halls, the street, the parks, the supermarkets. People respond to feedback or its lack. They didn’t know what my game was, they didn’t care or notice or even think about it, until finally I lived in glorious silence, alone, unmolested.
I even turned the sound off on my television set. I watched the faces of the actors, the anchors, the grinning and grimacing idiots on the commercials, and tried to interpret the action without sound. This gave me the idea of walking around with earplugs. I practiced in my living room, my ears stuffed with a magical synthetic, pliable and complete in its blockage, a sound barrier. I danced to music by feeling the beat in the floor. I held my hand against the walls as they trembled with treble and bass. I watched the phone quiver in its cradle.
Living without using your ears is not easy. The cues we get from sound – the rumble of a car engine, the crash in the back of the house as a cat knocks over a plant – I had to intuit, to tune into the vibrations, the way movement disturbs the air and the waves of sound glide past one’s skin. It almost became too much, the soft touch of the small sounds – the cat licking its chest, the refrigerator’s sigh – intermingling with the macho waves pushing their way out of the garbage truck, the slaps from ambulances, a neighbor’s shrill screams at her daughter or her dog or her husband a nasty cut across my cheek.
But most of the disturbances came from cars. The highway, with its low rumbles and its pretensions to ocean waves, was a constant undercurrent. My insides felt like they were being jumbled by the trucks of San Pablo. I thought about constructing a suit out of sheets of aluminum, something to deflect the noise, but I knew that would have its own cadence and would rob me of my anonymity. I had to be like the rest of them. I had to stop noticing, had to let the sounds pass through me as if they didn’t exist, another way to erase the world, to stop containing it in my body.
From the prompt "A time you let go."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. LIghtly edited.
Image by lemasney.