Silence Carved Me Open

I cannot hear the beeps of the heart monitor.

Do you hear that?
No, of course you do. You’re lucky. Your world is still stitched together with sound.
But for me, sound has become a ghost.

When I was a boy, the world was an orchestra. Every street had its rhythm: horse hooves on cobblestone, mothers calling their children in sharp soprano, church bells folding into the hour. Even silence had a tone back then, the hush before a performance, a held breath before thunder. I lived for it. I devoured it. Music was not something I played; it was something I was.

Tell me, what is the first sound you ever loved?
The rustle of leaves?
Your mother’s voice humming in the dark?
Whatever it is, imagine it being taken from you grain by grain, until it becomes only memory. That’s how it began for me. At first, just a soft ringing in my ears. I thought it was nothing, fatigue, exhaustion from touring. But soon it was everywhere. A constant hiss, as though silence itself had grown teeth.

Would you believe I still played? Of course I did. My hands remembered what my ears betrayed. But I couldn’t hear the notes clearly. They blurred together. Whole passages, gone. So I pressed harder, as though force could summon sound. It never worked.

Do you know what it feels like to stand before thousands, their faces glowing with adoration, their mouths wide with cheer, and hear nothing? It is not triumph. It is exile. They are celebrating with a man I can no longer be.

Sometimes I envy you. You, sitting here, reading this. You can still hear the cars horn before it hits you, the shuffle of your breath, the nervous tap of your fingers on the page. I have lost all that. My world has narrowed into vibration. I press my hand against the body of my violin, and I feel it trembling like a trapped bird, but the song never reaches me. I would beg for even the sound of metal screaming against metal in a roadside wreck, for the shattering chorus of glass and bones, because at least it would mean I could still hear. I would beg for the trembling voice of a child pleading with his father not to leave, even though the plea would break me in two

. I would beg for the wet, choked sobs of the woman I once swore to protect, the one I wounded instead, because her grief would still carry weight in the air. But instead, every day, the world slides further into silence, and I, who once lived inside the pulse of symphonies, am left begging for anything, even the ugliest sounds, just to know they still exist.

Would you keep playing, if you were me?
Would you pretend?
I tell myself I play for them, for the audience. But truthfully, I play for the ghost of myself. For the boy who once lived inside the music.

I fear one thing more than silence.
I fear forgetting.
What if one day the memory of sound slips away too? What if I forget how laughter rings, how rain pelts against windows, how applause sounds when it crashes like a storm? Then what am I? A shell of a musician mouthing a language I no longer speak.

You can hear, can’t you?
Then promise me something.
Promise me you’ll listen more carefully than I ever did. Don’t waste your sounds. Don’t rush through them. When someone laughs, stop and drink it in. When a door creaks, when a kettle hisses, when your own heartbeat thunders in your chest, listen. Hold on to it. Because the world does not stay loud forever.

One day, silence will find you too.
And when it does, you will remember me.