I sometimes wonder if I’m obsessed with the past or future, anything to neglect today until midnight. Once the clock eats itself and I see all zeroes it feels safe to worry about everything I’m currently doing—at least I can chalk that up to late night nerves and anxiety. Being Home is strange, especially this time of year. It’s those five days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve full of frantic time-wasting that makes me feel like it’s extra recess but all the balls have already been locked back into the crate. I don’t know if I hate this place.
Why can’t I be happy doing the things I like now here? Do I really not want to drive 10 minutes to get everywhere? Is an 18-hour Greyhound to barely make every big event really that much worse than being unable to hide from them? I’ve been watching these shadow puppets duke it out on the wall above my childhood desk for fifteen minutes too long. All I can hear is the tinfoil-in-a-silk-pillowcase drone in my right ear. Why didn’t I bring this desk up with me? Wasn’t I supposed to grow into it? That’s enough—I’ve got to go for a walk.
It’s not unprecedented or abnormal or concerning to go on a night walk. When I’m home it’s at least 80% of nights that I take a lap of the park two blocks over, but it’s pretty new for me at Home. There’s a million things I should do to get out of my room instead. I should say goodnight to my mom, bother my little sister about what’s going on in her life, go sit with my dad and the puppy and get a tan from the TV. But I need something else at this point.
The silver-lining of climate change is that it isn’t deathly cold at Christmas anymore. I don’t need to bundle up like I used to, just the necessities. The graphite puffer, jeans, headphones, and disintegrating sneakers will do—toque optional. It’s much easier to slip out now than in high school, Sylvi really did have it easier being the younger sibling, nobody bats an eye except the puppy.
I think I’ve taken to walking because it’s slow and just noisy enough that I can tune out the halfhearted whine while listening to music or whatever else my earbuds can blast out at 63% volume—I don’t want to damage my ears or anything even more. It feels strange to bring my home pastime back Home, whenever I used to walk here it was to get the dog to shit or just get out of the house. I guess I’m still just getting out of the house, but it feels different. I’m not running away from my family to go hangout with friends or play at being an adult—the Noise can’t take breaks.
At home I normally take a cig or two for the road—I’m probably not chemically addicted to them, but it’s nice to do something that feels so objective. I could eat or workout or binge tv, but I don’t really get anything from half smoking a Belmont and then sitting down on the church steps. The walking and music are enough for tonight.
As I leave the backyard, the sidestreet dips into the road below so it feels like I’m being pulled into it. It’s 11ish but it’s been dark since 4:30, the new streetlights really were necessary. I take a left at the bottom like I have a million times before. Maybe I can steal the street sign before I leave, take a little piece that points directly Home with me. Nobody is out this late, but I still cross under the streetlight so if somebody flattens me at least my family won’t have to worry about my student loans. I hope there’s a clause about my untimely death in the form-contract. Sylvi’s my company plan’s beneficiary anyways.
Every house on this street is pretty much the same minus some of the landscaping. Thank God I’m not old enough to have an opinion on shrubbery. Furniture takes up just enough space for now. While we’re on the way to the meadow I should come clean to you—these headphones are pretty new, three days new, in fact. My parents put together a really thoughtful gift, surprisingly: a nice, practical, set of noise-canceling headphones, because I’m “always listening to something”. One of those rare times when you get something you could actually really use. I haven’t yet.
My hang-up is that I’m not sure they fully understand why I’ve always got a bud in my right ear. In truth, I don’t exactly know either. The technical name for it is subjective tinnitus manifesting as a 1584Hz mostly square wave, but that sounds pretentious and fake. All the serious conditions are two words or less, everyone should know this. To make it simple—what I mean is—ever since I can remember there’s been a dull whine in my right ear. Sometimes loud and sometimes quiet, but never gone. Blaming it on physical malfunction seems lacking anyways. It feels deeper than my ear sometimes, deeper than my brain even, I’m talking part-of-my-self deep. I could spend the rest of my life trying to explain how it sounds, and I have for the last few years since I realized other people actually can’t hear something beneath the normal sounds.
It sort of all happened at once. I always assumed that I could just hear appliances half-running in the background and that’s what the hum was—it made sense in my head. But once my first semi-serious partner decided it’d be fun to go camping on a long weekend the excuses ran out. Two hours into the first night I gave up on sleep, just figuring that I was stressed out from being away from signal and comfort, but if I was away from all that why did the noise follow? We got back, broke up because of midterms or something, but the noise stayed getting louder and louder until I finally decided to use all of my school insurance on a doctor, then a therapist, then a specialist. The little old man seemed bored telling me that my Noise was probably born when my eardrum ruptured at two-and-a-half from a nasty ear infection but there’s no way to prove it. He looked sad when he told me it was permanent. Concerned when he told me to keep seeing that therapist.
Since then I’ve tried talking about it with various friends and partners, attempting to explain the apparent reason I’m never quite at ease. The tinnitus doesn’t really scare me, I can mask it with music and whatever background noise as long as I don’t start directly thinking about it. It’s kind of like the sun. Or a car crash. Or a particularly pronounced mole. The only time it really becomes an issue is when I’m spending a night with someone. I can’t really show a doctor’s note for why I need the TV or laptop to keep playing through the night. They usually just think I’m weird or disinterested.
We’re almost at my favourite part of my Home neighborhood—the meadow. The houses I’m passing are getting bigger, probably to hold all of their JDs, MDs, and DDs, but what would you expect of someone who decides to call the public park they live next to a meadow. The gate’s open like it’s always been, I’m not sure why they even have one. Something about the threat of not having it accessible making it more beloved and cherished. Or it was just a gift nobody needed or asked for. The headphones are sort of doing the same thing right now, fully charged and dangling around my neck like a brace. There’s another little hill down into the meadow proper, but this one is muddy and I get to scramble down it like I’m 10 years old again walking Bailey. My parents’ new puppy won’t walk through here for some reason or another.
Across the way from me is a strip mall whose lights hit the meadow just enough to make the dead wildgrass glow and the muddy patches look like craters. I feel like I’m Neil Armstrong finally seeing the moon up close after a lifetime away. No matter how lost I feel whenever I come Home I can never physically get lost here, even without the floodlights. I have enough memories to be signposts. The tree at the bottom of the slope I used as a finish line, sixtyish feet past that are the bushes where I tried to smoke a joint, another fifteen and there’s the stream I crashed my bike into while trying to jump it, lots of things like that. All the little things that made up who I was before I left.
I used to fantasize about bringing someone here and showing them all of the memories, going into inane detail with all the stories I have set here, maybe while we were having a picnic. It didn’t matter to me if it was romantic or platonic, I just wanted to bring someone in here so they could see it too. You can tell any story you want about how you almost started a small wildfire because you barely knew how to light a joint while hiding in a bush, but in the end does it really matter if you show someone the bush that it happened in? I don’t know. The memory is there no matter where I am, it’ll always follow me. I can always tell everyone I love about it, but I can never really make them see and feel it.
It’s finally the time and place to try these headphones out. Not exactly sure why, maybe this is the closest I can get to that weekend away camping. No fridge or TV to blame it on, the traffic is muffled by the bushes and trees surrounding the rim of the meadow. The stream doesn’t flow enough to audibly register. I don’t know if I’m ready though. Ever since I figured out that it’s not normal to always hear something, even when you want to hear nothing, it’s been maddening and frustrating and almost terrifying. I once described it as being a little turned on in class. You sit and shuffle around hoping nobody finds out your secret, afraid of what happens when the world knows and the mild horror on their faces. But this time you won’t be a pervert, they might just look and think you’re damaged. Say things like “Oh man, I can’t imagine how that feels!”. Which is nice but, ultimately, is just a sound a little louder than the cathode-ray tube in my right ear.
Outside of the way everyone else will look at me if I keep talking about my minor inconvenience of a medical issue, I’m afraid of how I’ll look at myself. What if it really is the result of too many ear infections as a little kid? Unfixable. Worse, what if it’s not physical but actually mental? Then I have bigger issues than a little omnipresent wave whispering at me.
Deep down I know that once I put these headphones on, the cause of my Noise won’t be made known, but I’ll know what their singing voice really sounds like without any possible excuses, and that’s inescapable. It’ll be like when you’re singing along in the car and suddenly the phone dies, cutting off the melody. Everything that just sounded so good and right will be out of tune and embarrassing. Everyone will quickly try to find the tune or just give up, but in that moment it’ll be immutable; a vanity mirror fringed with hospital lights.
I’m still going to do it. I need to know what these 1584Hz mostly square waves actually sound like with nothing else to blame them on. So here goes nothing, the ear pads do feel nice actually, the haptic whoosh for the start-up is a nice touch, and now it is quiet—all I can hear is the big CRTV in my grandmother’s hospital room and movie days in elementary school.