Auditory

Fancy seeing you here.

Woah! We're back after another three month hiatus! Finally had another little burst of inspiration the other night, and spent a good while just flexing some writing muscles, it was nice. I'd highly recommend it, even if you do end up doing it until five in the morning and trashing the next day's productivity.

Kachow!

So a bit of explanation, sometimes when I'm trying to focus on something I get a mild form of sensory overload. Too many people trying to talk at once, too many sights to process, it's like there's a kind of wall of noise, visual or audible, that starts to box my mind in and I get really irritable until I can take a minute to re-center myself. Normally I do this by putting on headphones and drowning everything else out in music, but lately I've been trying some really basic meditation. Controlled breathing, focusing on an imaginary central point, just mentally realigning myself. And it's hard, my brain is not of quiet nature, but when it does work I get this sense of accomplishment and control that's pretty hard to beat. 

So this next bit of writing was me kinda running with that idea of control over the mind, namely the sense of hearing, and if you could kind of tune yourself to hear more or less of the world around you, what would you hear? Hope ya like it :)

Your mind is a humming generator. Ambient, but loud. So loud you can get lost in your own white noise. When you silence your mind, and by extension yourself, you begin to hear everything else. So you listen, and at first come the big things.

Dogs barking in the far reaches of your neighborhood, a van door sliding shut at the gas station a few minutes out. The dripping of your faucet drives you mad for a moment, but it passes. You hear your neighbor crack open a beer can on their basement workbench, and their daughter closing the fridge after sneaking one for herself. A bird rearranges its nest after finding an old straw in the road, and you hear every leaf in its tree sway in the breeze. For a time your range seems to fluctuate; something quiet nearby, something louder very far away. Center yourself, and listen. 

From here, you begin to hear your own body. You can hear your heart beat, the double pump reverberates through your chest. It's deafening at first, you almost mistake it for the pulsing of your eardrums. Listen closer. 

You hear blood rushing through you. You hear your muscles stretch and retract, and your bones push against them. Your stomach churns and broils as it breaks down your breakfast, and your ribs rise and fall with your diaphragm pressed against your lungs. Your lungs, where you begin to hear the air you breathe brush against the alveoli, like wind in the trees. You hear it travel back up your throat, a tiny sea breeze over your saliva, and whistle across your teeth, like mountains on the coast. You keep listening.

You hear the air around you, moving through your hair and along your skin. The walls of your room, through every doorframe and along every windowsill. Your shelves seem to whisper to you as the air rustles every particle of dust on them, every page of every book like wind on the bark of the trees in your yard. You hear a spider crawl about the corner of your ceiling, and the silk of it's web like the strings of some mutilated harp. You can hear the hairs on that same spider, and the slight clicking of its mandibles. It uses an arm to brush its eyes, and it's as clear as a broom on hardwood. 

You almost lose your focus as that electric hum starts to become apparent again, like your brain beginning to wake up, however this sound is not you, and you continue to listen. 

Rather than within, you start to hear this all around you. In the spider, the books, the beer, the bird in the nest, *you yourself* emanate a low roar. This is not your mind. This is not water, or air, or any solid material around you, no not really. This is the atom's song. The buzz of electrons, the whir as they orbit the nucleus. The tack of neutrons on protons, like peeling a stamp off your finger. Every single one, in a chorus of energy, with an underlying harmony that sounds identical, just... deeper. Almost inaudibly deeper, almost nothing, and yet it begins to register louder... and louder... and so you listen.

It is, as far as you can tell, everywhere: directly beneath your feet, far above your head, and every direction you cock your ear to, in perfect harmony with the atoms, and you realize every one of those nuclei are in tune with the stars. Helios, Beetlejuice, Alpha Centauri, every single star belting out the same low roar. Earth, Jupiter, Pluto, the same thrum as the electrons. The symphony of the universe is before you, written in sheet music. All that's left is space. The void, the abyss, which you know for a fact does not make a sound, and yet something seems to tug at you. Beneath the lines of the staff, within the notes, seems to be a sound you can not describe. A black noise. The sound of silence, if there ever was such a thing, because now, unmistakably, you hear something else. Something new. And so you listen.

End Captain's log.