Perfectly Imperfect

Disarray To Melody

As pathetic as it may seem, the ringing was the only thing holding his sanity together. The only sound he could hear since they lifted the sheet was the ringing. The only feeling in his body was the pressure in his ears.

But the sound was disappearing, and he hated it.

Maybe it was his body telling him to get over himself. After all he wasn’t the dead one. He wasn’t the one slated to be buried in moist soils surrounded by other dead people.

He was still alive, as much as he hated it. As much as he wished it were him. Him who was dead.

He was still here, curled in on himself willing the ringing to return, he couldn’t take the silence, or any other sound that came at him. He wouldn’t -couldn’t- do it. How could he trusts the sounds of the outside world, when he couldn’t handle the silence of his their –now solely his- home?

No matter how hard he pressed into his ears the ringing was fading, no matter how much he willed the world to pause, to give him more time it wouldn’t. Circling and surrounding him in crushing silence, inescapable darkness, punishing numbness. It was suffocating him, and he liked it.

It was surreal, corporeal, unrelenting. It dragged him out of his body, an experience he couldn’t escape, but it was all in his head. But in his head he wasn’t expected to react, to move, to live. He liked it because he wasn’t ready to do anything else yet.

But the ringing was fading, flitting off through the cracks in his broken mind to pester someone else with the numb sensation of Grief. The ringing was replaced with a surreal silence, burning him out from the very depths of his being.

That is until he hear it. Another sound to replace the silence. He prayed it was the ringing coming back to drag him into static and empty nothing. But the new sound wasn’t a hard static, it might have even been his imagination. Like a whisper from across the room, it barely touched his ears, and yet he couldn’t even recall what it was.

Melodic and soft, buzzing with energy yet so soft he might’ve missed had he not been closing himself off to the silence. Raising his head his puffy peach rimmed eyes searched the lonely flat. Nothing moved, nothing creaked, he was completely and utterly alone. The only sound was the rustling of his unkempt hair sliding against one another and the drag of breath into his lungs.

Blinking into the barely lit room he watched a soft sunset slide over his windows pressing the day under a cloud of darkness and rising the stars and moon high enough to illuminate the room in blue and white. Yet he heard nothing, it was like a dream, a confusing bewitchment of his mind where the sound lurked in the crevice of his thought. A song you could hear in your head but could never place.

Silence drifted back into his safe space, cradling him with all it had to offer. And like a rubber band it was gone. Snapped beneath the pressure of sound. That soft song he couldn’t be sure was real.

His eyes snapped to the left searching for the noise, why couldn’t he leave it be. He must’ve been imagining it, there was nothing left to create such a soft melody in the house. Yet as soft as it was there was no mistaking its presence. To the left out the window, the peppered melody strung his heart on keys he could vaguely identify as music.

His knees slipped from his grasp pressing his uncovered knees into the cold tile. The slap of tile and flesh echoed in the home, it covered the sound. He waited. There were thirty-seven counts before it returned. Barely above a whistle of breath, then it grew. Billowing like a great sheet in the wind filling the empty space with noise. Surrounding him he was entranced by the music, so far enticed with its sound he could sort out the sounds, none were exact but he felt eh sound rising in his chest, maybe a flute, maybe a violin, a voice?