Crazy in a Noise

If crazy were a noise, it’d be ringing in your ears.

There’s a fly somewhere in the distance, or the buzz of electricity through a telephone wire more like. Except it’s not in the distance, it’s next to you, inside of you. It starts in your head, towards the top; where people tap when they say knock on wood and there’s no wood around. That’s where it lives, the noise; the high-pitched whine like a monster that’s always in torment. Always tormenting you.

Sometimes, when it’s decided to screech louder than other days, you end up on the floor. Crying. There’s no other place for you to be, to go. No other bit of hope that you can grab onto. So you sit on the floor, with your knees high up, and her head buried in your arms. Yet when you lift your head it’s still there, unchanged.

Sometimes, when it’s decided that it can’t be contained anymore you just want to rip your heart out. That will stop it, it can’t live without a heart. It can’t live without your heart. It’d be so easy, killing it like that. You’d never have to live another day with this monster in your head.

Yet you always move on, somehow. You can’t spend all day crying after all, there’s always things you need to do, and a life to get on with. It comes with you, wherever you go. Sometimes the noise of the world covers it for awhile, and you manage to forget. It just sits there, ringing it’s incessant bell, but at least for awhile, you can pretend it’s not.

It wakes up at night, when everything else is silent. That’s when it’s want you to remember it exists. Maybe it’s nocturnal, sleeping when the world is busy, but rising when the world isn’t. It makes your world busy. It makes you wish you could cover your ears and block out everything, but you can’t block out what’s inside of you.

Each night you pray that in the morning you’ll wake up and it will be gone. It will have fled through your ear and dissipated in the air. You pray again the next night and the next.

You’re told it will go away, it just needs time. All monsters need a bit of time reigning before they get bored and move somewhere else. There’s nothing else that can be done; it will leave, one day.

The days go on. The tears begin to slow, what’s the point in crying about something that can’t be fixed? All you can do is wait so all you do is wait. You get used to it, it starts to become normal. You hate it, it’s not a friend, but you know it’s there, and you know you can live with it. Your heart stays within you.

The months go on. Yet the months, stop. You roll your head over one morning and pause, wait. You were going to say hello, as you pitifully do every morning, to the friend inside your head. And for a moment it’s not there. For a moment you hear every noise in the world, every breath of air around you. And it’s not there.

Your grin turns to a frown, as with the next breath of air you find an inkling. It’s still there, living inside your head. But less, just an inkling, just a murmur. It’s not a ringing of a bell, or the buzz of a telephone wire. It’s just a murmur of something dying.

It’s dying, and you’re not. It will die, and you won’t.

If crazy were a noise, it’d be ringing in your ears. But crazy isn’t a noise, and one day, the monster will be unheard.

Reviews

[barleygirl]

This is an amazing & unexpected piece of writing. I'll tell you the truth, it would be difficult to stay interesting when all you've done is basically describe the noise in a person's head. That's why I'm in a state of wonder at how you kept this so interesting & compelling. What an imagination you have, plus you also have an acute sense of observing the s**t that goes thru our own minds, such that you capture it very realistically in words, making the mundane rattles into a dynamic storyline . . . to me, this is a work of magic. The "knock-on-wood" diatribe at the beginning makes for an arresting opening & then wrapping back around to NOT being the ringing of a bell or telephone line, these wrap your spiel with a ribbon, like opening up someone's head & watching their brainwaves (((HUGS))) Fondly, Margie

[Archia]

Thank you so much for reading. I do like to try and write about more simple things, I think it can be more relatable and sometimes that makes it interesting. Thank you again, I really appreciate everything you've said and the thought you put into this review.