Noise

May 12th, 2022

Irina was glad it was about to rain. 

She knew most of the crowds would flock away once a drip of water grazed their heads. 

She had created quite an odd-looking scene for strangers to take in. She sat by a small river that flowed by a large house overlooking her bubble. On her lap was a small, ripped-up pink blanket that had started off as a summery tye-dye print but now resembled a bloody rag stained with bleach. It was warm out, but she carried that blanket along with a scarf everywhere she went and created a cocoon for herself every time she sat down with those two things. On her blanket was a soda bottle decorated with the ashes of extinguished cigarettes and a thermos of oatmeal she had decided to eat on some random bench rather than in the comfort of her home. In one hand was a spoon and in the other was a fist full of fabric she continued to pull on in an attempt to create an imaginary cave made of her scarf.

Irina had come to sit here quite often. The bench was in clear view from the path it trailed off from, but for some reason, people acted as if they couldn’t see it and chose to sit on the benches that were connected to the path. It was good for her because she couldn’t see the pedestrians even though they could see her. She had plenty of benches and parks that were isolated from people and yet she chose to sit here just to be in the presence of them even though she didn’t like to acknowledge them. 

So normally she didn’t necessarily want everyone to flock away. She just wanted their opinions to, not their presences. 

People only appeared when she looked behind herself. There had only been one instance where that statement was proven false, and that was when another person sat with her. When she continually felt the need to check for eyes, none had come into view. It was like that guy created some kind of barrier blocking all outside noise and inside noise from this very bench where she sat now.

But now that barrier was gone.

She only craved other’s presence to protect herself from her own thoughts. So if her inner noise was gone, there was no need for that outside presence. 

Right now Irina had unconsciously turned her head and caught the view of a mother walking with a stroller down the path. She could hear those stupid wheels squeaking all the way up the hill like one of the rusty shopping carts at her grocery store. However, when she began to turn her attention to the ducks, the squeaking had vanished and succumbed to silence for the next twenty minutes until she turned her head again. Whenever a person passed by it seemed like all their movements were isolated from the rest of the park. They echoed as if they were in a bubble, or more as if they had entered her bubble.

This time, Irina was not sitting on this bench because she wanted to be in the presence of people. In fact, this was the first instance she had sat on this bench in hopes of one single person being in her presence. 

The image of complete silence still remained in her head because she knew that day, with that person, she truly wanted complete silence. Most times she came here she didn’t want interaction but she wanted noise. She wanted a cocoon of peace and quiet surrounded by the noise because complete peace and silence would create its own noise. 

So there was an option of outside noise or inside noise under the guise of silence but never silence itself. To be in a cocoon, there had to be outside noise to shield it from inside noise.

Otherwise, her body would resort to cannibalizing itself.

On that day she had let someone into her cocoon. The outside noise would act as a shield, but it was never able to enter until then. Maybe it never bothered to enter in the first place. She felt like she had turned to channel twenty-four and one tiny dot decided to fly off the snow screen and into her bubble.

 Sometimes when she was at home and her head began to generate noise she would drown it out with that same channel through the snow screen instead. 

That day she realized having a tiny portion of the noise - instead of huge, drowning masses on either side - created the illusion of silence. Loud enough to act as a barrier but quiet enough that she was barely aware it did so. 

Things like that were foreign to Irina’s head so they would never last very long because they would get caught up in the same cannibalization that appeared when she was around her inner noise too long. It was almost like her mind was selfish enough to only beat up herself but poisoned others into beating up themselves instead of outwardly attacking another person. No, that was too hard, too gutsy.

She always seemed to get involved with people who were too much like her even though she got along with people who were opposite of her. Or maybe it was just her s**t working its way into their systems. Maybe they had all started off as opposites of her.

Irina didn’t know which negative aspect was present that day and she never bothered to look. She never bothered to look if the speck would last because she was under the illusion of silence.

It all went in circles. 

Irina lived her life in circles because of how much she thought. Her head seemed to create this constant noise almost as some type of coping mechanism. Whether it was bad or good, there was so much noise that her life seemed almost surreal. She would forget key events because she passed them off as dreams and turned people into characters who never interacted with Irina the person. There was no Irina the person, in fact, because she had turned herself more into a character than anyone else.

Her head, she thought, only survived at times by pretending like it was dead. 

It had to make things blurry because her emotions were too intense for her own well-being. 

And so sitting on this bench without her usual intention of being around outside noise meant her inner noise was beginning its cannibalization at this very moment. She wasn’t aware it had started until it stopped for a few split seconds.

And she knew that if it was fading and she had tuned back into life, something had taken its place. There was something blocking both sides.

Irina had felt the presence of something behind her. She hadn’t turned to look over her shoulder. She hadn’t even moved from her position. She knew the outside noise never disrupted the inside noise unless it was small enough to poke inside. 

It started with a crunch of the old, dehydrated leaves and then a squish of shoes in the damp mud. She couldn’t tell if it just started drizzling or if she just hadn’t noticed before. After she became aware of the drizzling the squishing and crunching went away but hadn’t returned to the path. There was no breathing, there were no shadows due to the lack of sunlight, but there was something there.

Her mind was in a fog and her stomach seemed to be the only part of her body that was active. A wave of shock passed over her and collected inside, doing gymnastics and paving the way for a wave of nausea to follow. Her heart sped up and she fiddled with her fingers as the rest of her body remained completely still. The water froze, the little drizzles of rain turned to icicles, and the wildlife fell under a brief spell of chilling silence.

Wait.

She remembered that once or twice an old man came to fish in this spot. It must’ve been him. It had to be him. She relaxed and her body unfolded again as she waited for the familiar figure to appear in front of her. 

Yes, it had to be him.

Right?

One second.

Two seconds. 

Thirty seconds went by with nothing but isolated tears sliding their way down the bench and the trees. She heard each individual drip echo within the depths of her mind as she waited, waited, waited.

Her chest began to expand again to make room for her heart with each passing minute. And the only thing that stopped it was a somber hand that gripped the edge of the bench with an unsettling amount of force. 

Her chest stopped expanding.  Her heart was placed under the same spell the rest of the wildlife had fallen under. 

One second. 

Two seconds. 

A light gasp left her body as her eyes met the man’s fingers. Her heart could no longer withstand the chill and shattered into little frozen chunks. The familiar appearance. The force. It had all left her when she looked at that hand. 

Irina gulped, but failed to utter a single word. The person must’ve taken her gasp as recognition, despite the fact that she hadn’t even made eye contact, so he no longer needed to apply the same shocking force to sit down. In fact, it felt as if a fly had just landed on the bench. Her whole body sunk into that bench but it seemed as if he was floating. He just appeared. And Irina found it hard to convince herself it was real. 

She thought that would really be the turning point -  hallucinating a human being. 

She was able to meet the eyes of the figure, and almost as if she was looking in a mirror, they looked back. It was like the set of eyes was separate from the person. There was no speaking from the mouth or movement from the rest of the head. Just a stare.

“Why?” Was her biggest question. And next came, “how?” 

Her shield was sitting right in next to her.

The gaze sparked a wave of hope and recognition within her. The eyes were the same amber shade they had always been before. She noticed the little golden flecks were still dancing around the edge of his irises, and his big round eyes were wide open, like they wanted to take in every possible sense that circulated around him.

But the life that usually propelled that want was gone. 

Irina’s face collapsed as she began to take in the rest of his appearance.

 There was no reflection in his eyes, no little white dots to flood his gaze with a sense of life. His pupils stayed unmoving specks, and the eyes themselves looked as if they were bleeding into his head. They were…dead.

Irina couldn't tell what she was looking at. It was like she was looking more at a personification than an actual human being.  A personification...of what?

She didn't know.

Irina didn't know this man anymore.

Irina was having deja vu but she was sure this scene had already played out before. This had happened, except in a different place at a different time. A different park. A different set of circumstances. Maybe he was aware of that too because he was the one who sat down first. 

“Why are you here?” Irina asked. "Who are you? Are you even real?"

His mouth was glued shut. His eyes might as well have been glued shut too. He gave no response, just positioned his view to her face, like the eyes weren’t even looking at her, just through her face . A very thin curtain of hair covered small portions of amber light seeping through the cracks. But it wasn’t enough. Whatever was there was not enough for Irina to see a person. 

Irina’s eyes began to get cloudy. “What happened?...” she said, then hesitated. “Wh-where…where did you go?”

Her lips were locked in a half-open position, like they were literally fighting being pried open with her thoughts. But the thoughts had no shape and no way to form words, so her mouth couldn’t let anything out. Two sides of her were fighting against each other which left her in a state of nothing. Confusion. Everything. 

Every indent in the mud from the rain vibrated, and every chirp of a bird shook the bubble she was in. Then there was just silence, and the seconds poked her, taunted her, and sliced away any sense of melancholy and peace she had once he showed up. 

And now all she could see was a wave crashing upon her with the brute strength of all that noise combined. Her eyes were filled with it, and the salt made it burst out her eyes and her nose with horrible stinging and sharp pains. It felt like her heart was detached from her chest and it was struggling to erupt from her throat. Or perhaps she was trying to swallow it down. She could feel it all, sliding up and down her throat like it was trying to choke her.  

Irina didn’t dare to look at him but she could've sworn she felt the surrounding air tense up and his arms stiffen. But still, he said nothing.

She paused, sniffling with wispy breaths. This man was mute. Voluntary mute. Irina’s undefined emotion began to mush around in the ugly gunk of rage and it began to leak out along with her tears. Her eyebrows twisted together, distressed, and before she knew it she was yelling past her previous silent streams. “Answer me!” She burst out. Her voice was dry and crackly, but her hands were damp, and little droplets of snot, tears, and sweat all combined in a foul clot of emotions oozing throughout her face. She couldn’t stand wondering what she looked like. 

But a slight tilt of her head was all it took to see the same exact display of her feelings projected onto his face. It was jarring. She was looking at nothing itself. The absence of noise. And yet right now there was noise all over his face. 

He answered her. 

And so now she had the courage to ask another question. The weight of his appearance right now had the power to squash whatever flames had been growing, and the tone of her voice went from upset child to kindergarten teacher. She was so quiet she could barely even hear herself speak. There was no screeching or cracks in her voice, just a leveled breath of words. 

“Are you here to… take me away?” 

He pursed his lips, eyes squinted in pain, and then nodded. 

Maybe this was what she wanted. What she needed to escape the noise. Everything. Life itself.

She had no more than a few seconds to contemplate because she was pulled into a state of darkness.  And she left. She completely left wherever she was at the moment. There was no big noise, no static, just a tiny little speckle of black she had escaped in to get away from the rest of the dots moving together. He must've known she was due to erupt once he nodded his head. But she was strangely at peace with things, like she could breath and smile without being tied to some sack of bricks on her lips. She could remain still.

There was no outside. There was no inside. All she had wanted this whole time was just an end. 

Irina was able to let her head collapse inside the speckle of noise. Her heart slowed and her breathing slowed. Irina thought no more. All she could hear was whispers - of what, she didn't know. Her head was cocooned by something more than just her scarf and her body shrunk into a speck that was probably smaller than all the rest as she held onto all that was left.  

Her body drooped with a good kind of weight, and she closed her eyes as hard as she could in some desperate attempt to nail her head in this scene so it could never leave. So it could never be in a different state.

Her mind had found what it was looking for, even if it was nothing. Even if it was an end. She hoped when she fled to nothing she would never have to go back into something.

Author's Note

I don't actually know what I tried to make out of this anymore and I'm getting a headache reading it so I guess you can just treat this as a shitty vent story with no real plot but thinking too much and suicide lol

Reviews

[TamsinDaya]

I read this story a few times and I must say, I really felt sorry for Irina, trapped in her own headspace with thoughts endlessly cycling. I've had that feeling before and it's not pleasant.

[Annalisa (Marujuust)]

I'm glad I was at least able to make someone feel something. Thanks for the review.