My Inside Voice

A little night magic at the end of a long break

I’ve always felt like my life was over. If you look at my 16-year-old diary, you’ll read that I felt a thousand years old even then. At 25, I thought I was ancient. By 30, a dinosaur. Then I had a child, and for a short time, I felt fertile and abuzz with the fiery cub scout spirits who surrounded me. Then whatever was left of my youth got sucked out of me by this glorious, hungry creature who needed the last dregs of said youth in order to survive. Then I turned 50, and my juvenescence officially passed away, but in my mind, I am still the same age as I’ve always been.

I’m going to be 90 still thinking I’m 12.

With that in mind, for the past five years or so, I’ve been living with tinnitus. This absurd ringing in my ears that sounds like cicadas screeching and it never ever EVER stops. I got it from a few years of almost daily spin classes, where the volume sat at 98 decibels, and I was too cool to wear earplugs like the other middle-aged nerds in the room. (Pro tip - wear your earplugs, kids!) When the ringing first arrived, I read a lot about the condition, how it can drive people nuts and, in some cases, even to suicide. Right then and there, I decided not to be bothered by it.

It’s a mental exercise to zone it out, but when it really ticks me off, I pretend I’m in the forest at night looking at the stars and don’t mind it so much. It can be mildly meditative if you take it in the right way. During class, it helps drown out the inevitable sound of an English major cracking their knuckles (why do they all do this!?) When I’m on my own, I pay attention to if and when it undulates, wondering what outside or inside force is shifting the intonation. When I think about the stretch of life that reaches from here to 90, and I imagine this noise, always with me like a Goddamn manic shadow, it does make the corner of my eye twitch slightly. The fact that I will never again get a moment of peace and quiet feels overwhelming and makes me want to move to the beach because the ocean is one of the only sounds that drowns it out. The low whir of the pottery wheel does a bit, too, and I’m so busy thinking about what my hands are touching that I don’t have the bandwidth to worry about what my ears are feeling. Sometimes I pretend the sound is magic, an otherworldly force communicating a divine secret to me, but my cynical mind knows it’s momentary. See, I'm not a believer.

The damnedest thing about it is the frequency at which my husband speaks sits just below the ringing, so when he says, “Honey, can you pass me my phone?” I think he is saying, “Bunny, what’s that thing on your dome?” I have no hearing loss, but I still can’t hear shit, and I have to repeat always… come again, come again, come again. If I am in the kitchen and the water is running / the oil is sizzling / the dogs outside are barking, and you call to me from the other room, I might as well be a million miles away from all civilization, alone, just me and my brain sound, frying an egg.

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of a child of 12, a woman going on a thousand, past her prime, but still uptalking like a little girl. Buzzing and beautiful, wishing she could start over, but knowing she wouldn’t if she could.