The One Who Hears Everything

Laura Rink

Word Count 1720

In my house, NPR doesn’t whisper through the radio. The news doesn’t announce from the television. I don’t listen to Sanskrit chants while I do yoga, or mournful duduk melodies while I write about my Armenian family and the genocide they survived. There is no soundtrack to folding the laundry or cooking dinner. There are no earbuds inserted when I hike in the forest or stride on the treadmill.

I prefer silence. 

I prefer the spin of my own thoughts. 

*

I’m the one that hears the leaks— the slow drip from the toilet’s water line, the constant plunk from the furnace pipe exiting the roof, the buzz of pinholes in a copper pipe in the ceiling. I hear an unusual sound. I investigate. I present my findings to my husband.

For several evenings now as I lie in bed reading I’ve heard something, something unusual, like an 18-wheeler idling in the road below us or the refrigerator or the furnace taking on a new pitch. For several evenings I’ve been lazy. I’ve shirked my investigative duties. I’ve tried to focus on the book I’m reading, instead.

Tonight, I can’t focus. I put down the book and shut my eyes. The sound, like muted television static or bees swarming or a mechanical whirr, engulfs me. I throw back the covers and stand at the front window, listen north down the hill. No truck idling. I open the small window facing west—the soft trill of the creek is not what I’m hearing. 

I pull on my robe and tilt my ear to the furnace, the hot water heater, the fridge, and hear the usual pings and gurgles.

I hear this new sound and can’t find its source. I get back into bed and pick up my book. The sound—the thrum, the drone, the buzz remains with me. I plug my ears, and still I hear it.

Damn, the sound is coming from me.

*

Years ago, I went on a ten-day silent meditation retreat. I wanted to see the effect of meditation on my annoyingly-wired brain, to see if focused breathing could slow my whirly-gig of constant tangential thoughts, and restrain my leap-frog attention span. 

 The silent part also appealed to me—no talking, with a few exceptions, for ten days. I shared a room with two other women, shared a communal bathroom and dining area with thirty but no talking. We were to be as if alone on this ten-day meditative journey. 

On the seventh day, as I breathed and kept my attention on the sensations of my body, I began to feel vibrations along the surface of my skin. We’d been moving our attention, our breath, down and back up our bodies bit by bit. I inhaled, focused on my head and as I exhaled, imagining my breath cascading down my skull, vibrations rose thick around my head, with a pleasurable hum that I felt more than heard. In my mind’s eye I saw those vibrations as a mass of white quivering spheres, the size of marbles. Soon the rush and hum diminished. I continued to sweep up and down my body with each exhale, and while I felt tingling on my skin, the thick vibrations didn’t return.

 The sounds I hear now are like those vibrations during meditation, something separate yet a part of me. I think about the spaces between atoms, how solid objects aren’t, atomically speaking, solid. Could I be hearing reverberations that are always there, those quivering marbles felt and heard in a meditative state? Is this what enlightenment sounds like? 

*

Whatever the source, the sounds in my ears grow louder, heard not only in the stillness of evening but during the day. A mass of static hovers in my ears, smothering my thoughts with a discord of thrum, buzz, and whirr. Sometimes the static shifts in tone and texture. When the mostly low-pitch drone shrieks into single high notes, I shake my head and pull at my ears. The shrieks last only a few seconds but now in addition to being irritable and sleep-deprived, I’m angry, and scared. 

I hop on the internet to do my own research. Alas, it is soon clear that I have not achieved a zen state such as would allow me to hear the shuffling of atoms in the atmosphere. I more than likely have tinnitus. Tinnitus is the result of hearing loss, whether from aging, illness, sudden injury, or life-long loud noise exposure. But I hear fine! I hear tiny leaks in the ceiling!

Tinnitus, the internet tells me, occurs when hearing is diminished for only some frequencies. Since those frequencies are no longer picked up, the part of my brain in charge of those frequencies has lost its job, is, in effect, bored. So bored that the brain conjures up sounds at those frequencies, to give itself something to do, to give itself its job back, so to speak. The brain does this constantly without taking any breaks. 

There is no cure. 

There are no proven treatments.

This is outrageous. Unbelievable even, except I’m hearing it with my own ears.

But, the internet declares, here is some good news! It’s easy to mask those sounds with other sounds! Many people plagued with tinnitus use background noise—a radio or white-noise machine.

I like quiet. A radio is adding noise to an already noisy situation. I want the noise to stop.

*

The noise doesn’t stop. I’m driving home from the grocery store, listening not to the flow of traffic or the road noise but to the underlying buzz of my new reality. My bored brain is making sounds to entertain itself. This is literally all in my head. My ears are hearing sounds no one else can hear, and I will hear them, always.

Due to the severity of their tinnitus, some people attempt suicide. I’m not surprised to learn that fact. I’m afraid my tinnitus will increase in volume and make a newly fraught life even more unsteady. Tinnitus can have an adverse impact on every aspect of one’s life, and therapy and medication are sometimes recommended to help with depression brought on by those impacts. A radio playing in the background is obviously not an effective mitigation strategy for everyone. 

Later at home, I snap at my husband to turn the television volume down. Normally, I would put on noise-cancelling headphones but there is nothing normal about tinnitus. Headphones muffle outside sounds, not the racket coming from inside my head. So regardless of where the noise is coming from, I have no escape.

I continue having trouble falling asleep. Trouble going back to sleep after waking up. I can’t concentrate on my writing, or when reading a book. The sounds in my head are getting worse. 

*

I finally get in to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist. I’m given a hearing test, then the doctor looks in my ears. No wax buildup, nothing visibly concerning. After listening to my impassioned description of my symptoms, his diagnosis confirms what I already know: tinnitus. He suspects mine is from normal age-related hearing loss.

Stress can make it worse, he says. 

Yes, I know, I reply. 

Now that I have a definite diagnosis, I could, in theory, stop exclaiming over the existence of the sounds in my head and start trying to ignore them. Habituation is defined as the diminishing of a physiological or emotional response to a frequently repeated stimulus. I could try to focus beyond the sounds or around the sounds, and hope with time I’d habituate to their enduring presence.

I’m not zen enough for such a practice. After the mediation retreat, we were encouraged to meditate at least one hour, morning and evening, for the rest of our lives. I managed thirty minutes for three weeks, when, instead of feeling calm and focused, I became impatient and irritated. Like I am now with my tinnitus. I want these intrusive sounds to stop.

*

I start listening to a recording of waves at night. This is not the quiet I prefer, but the splash and hiss of water ebbing and flowing is outside of my head where sounds belong. The waves make sense in a way the tinnitus never can. The waves are rhythmic. The tinnitus is a tiny blaring horn, a mass of discordant bees, perpetual static. The waves are gentle but louder than the sounds my brain is manufacturing. I am lulled to sleep. 

 I try using the waves during the day but somehow the whooshing water now annoys me. I want quiet. But the quieter the environment, the more noticeable the tinnitus. I go outside where the wind rustles through boughs of cedar and hemlock, masking, somewhat, the incessant noise inside my head. I stand on the patio in the hush of an inhale, the making of a void. Then the wind begins its rush forward. I hear the wind before I see the tree tops bend, before I feel my hair sail around my head. I want to stand here all day.

*

I don’t stand there all day, of course. Taking the clamor in my head with me, I return to the house. Bills must be paid. Emails returned. The cat fed. Life lived. I watch a movie with my husband. I go for a walk with a friend. The days and weeks plod by.

And, without me realizing it, little by little I notice the sounds in my ears less often, or at least not constantly. It isn’t an improvement in my symptoms; it is habituation—the thing I declared would never happen for me. I know it’s habituation because while I was thinking about, writing, and then revising this essay, my tinnitus got worse. Or not worse, but more noticeable. I gave my tinnitus attention and it turned up the volume of its unrehearsed symphony. 

 I haven’t fully accepted this less than quiet outcome, but, it must be noted, time can, if not heal, at least turn down the volume on some wounds. 

 *

In my house, NPR still doesn’t whisper through the radio. The news doesn’t announce from the television. But there is a soundtrack to folding laundry, cooking dinner, and everything else I do. A muffled thrum, whirr, and buzz that plays along with the spin of my thoughts. My own private cacophony.

Laura is writing a memoir about her Armenian grandmother and the Genocide of 1915-1923. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop in 2021. Her essays are online at the Brevity Blog, Two Hawks Quarterly, The Keepthings, and Short Reads. She blogs at LauraRink.com and It’s a Good Day on Substack.