Disquiet
It has always been a tenuous thing, your ability to tolerate your surroundings. Call it the result of an overprotective mother. Call it pre-adolescent trauma. Give it so many names you can bury it as a problem, avoid it, shuffle it under the stack of papers on your desk. Your brain is gifted in making mountains out of molehills, serial killers out of men coming up the sidewalk, rabid raccoons out of sweetly stray cats who run in the other direction. Your gift for fear is no small thing. Your gift for fear is endless. Your gift for fear is a loud silence and it does not like being spoken of, even in the softest whispers.
Then there is music—music, and sound, and all the small ways you can stop your brain from chewing on itself long enough to make the trek to work, to go to the grocery store, to walk down the street to the good coffee shop. Bless the playlist and the gospel of good headphones which calm your flight anxiety long enough to get to Philadelphia in the first place. Take the communion of the Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. Send all your prayers to the podcasts that still your brain long enough to sleep at night. The double-and-triple-check ritual that all your songs are downloaded so you don't get stuck listening to the same five on the long Uber drive to the airport, during the wait to confront your fear of flying before boarding the plane, across New England on the flight over. Your fears are strange and glittering in your repertoire of reality like rare jewels. Among the sound of heartbeats, the horror of veins under skin, the drives over suspension bridges—what is flying to contend with if you've got a good playlist?
The better question is, how will you fare without one?
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On a cheery Friday afternoon, a little over a month ago, two hours after landing in Philadelphia and not even twenty minutes after buying a new deck of Linestrider Tarot cards you'd stumbled on by chance in the Reading Terminal Market, someone steals your purse off the back of your chair. This is a problem for several obvious reasons and one not so obvious one: along with your money and debit cards and writing notebook and Kindle and all Valid Forms Of Identification So You Can Go Home On An Airplane, your phone and headphones were in your now hijacked purse.
Which means that you are going to have to survive a weekend without music to keep you calm in public places. Which means you are going to have to survive a weekend without podcasts to lull you to sleep. Which means your heart is beating faster. Which means you can hear the blood rushing to your head. Which means you have to take a couple of really deep breaths and pretend to everyone in your group that you are not going to have a Quantum Meltdown and handle this like the respectable adult you have supposedly grown up into.
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This is the thing you learn about silence: the layers of it. The hum of the electric fan in the living room. The bird song from outside the windows, and the clips of conversations by passersby. The creaks and taps of the building settling around you. Footsteps from upstairs. The child speaking to her mother on the plane ride back from Philadelphia. Your own spiraling thoughts, anxious and afraid and surprised that it really is just another normal day. The swell of that, that nothing bad has actually happened without your headphones to hold onto. That you have survived without music. That life can be experienced without gauze between you.
And though you have folded back into your music, though you have wrapped yourself tightly in the headphone wires, though every trek begins and ends in a ballad, you know that even without it, you, even you, can be safe.