The Buzzing, Pulsating Hum

I just need to take a moment to breathe. I can’t deal with, well, everything, right now. I turn off all the noises that have been humming about. The computers, the phones, everything that could possibly distract me. This is too much. I try to unfocus. Just in and out. I focus on my breathing. Not too shallow, not too deep. Not too fast, not too long. Just in and out. I know better than to try counting. Trying to be exact would only be another distraction. Just in and out. I get into a rhythm. Or at least, I try to. And yet, all I hear is the faint buzzing. That same faint buzzing. It burns through my mind, through my breathing. Very unhelpfully.

I don’t know what it is, but I need to find it. It’s going to drive me insane. I walk around the apartment. It seems to be coming from the goddamned walls. “Just shut up!” I shout at the wall and let loose a punch. My fist slams into the wall. It’s somewhat cathartic, though all it really succeeds in doing is hurting my hand. I shake the pain away. It doesn’t actually work, but it’s much cheaper than any sort of actual pain relief. Especially since the stupid noise is too distracting to care at all about any pain. I try to breathe again. It doesn’t help. The noise is all I can hear. The pulsating hum. It’s all around me. It seems to be coming from all over. Maybe it’s just my apartment, I realize. If someone knows what happened, just wants to make me suffer, putting some weird noise maker type things in my walls would be a logical way to do that.

I head out of my small apartment. It’s on the third floor. I take the stairs down. The apartment building’s hallway is just as loud as my apartment. I don’t want to wait for an elevator. Not with this hum attacking me from all sides. As I leave, I note my neighbor coming in. She doesn’t seem bothered by the cacophony. I’d stop to talk, but I need to find a quiet place where I can just stop and take a breath. Think about things, figure some things out. Without this damnable buzzing getting in the way of my thoughts. I head outside to the street.

It doesn’t help. If anything, I think the sound on the street is louder than in the apartment building. But the street isn’t where I figured to go. After all, there is so much stuff here that torturing me without getting noticed wouldn’t be too hard. I cross the street and walk over a block to the bus stop. The bus arrives and I get on it. No one else is on the bus. I walk to the back and seat myself. The hum is still there, though most of it seems to be coming from outside the walls of the bus, and from the difference upon walking in, the bus itself dulled the noise a bit. A good start, at the very least. Hopefully getting out of the city will help.

As I sit for the twenty minute ride to the mountain, however, I start to feel something else as well. I say feel, because it’s not exactly a sound. It definitely is more of a feeling, like a vibration. Like when a deep enough noise messes with your equilibrium. But there’s something else about the feeling, something familiar. I can’t quite place it.

Eventually, the bus does arrive at the base of the national park that is essentially a really big hill. They call it a mountain, but it really isn’t. Getting up is a little woozy with the new feeling, but I do, and I make my way out. I head over to the cable car up to the top of the so-called mountain. I’d avoid it and climb the hill, but it’s slightly illegal and I’d prefer not to get arrested for something like this. Kinda a dumb reason to get arrested, you know?

Standing in the cable car, surrounded by tourists and people like me who are just trying to escape, I feel the same feeling as in the bus. I grip the bar to maintain my balance. That doesn’t really help. The quiet buzzings that seem similar to the cacophony from before, though not nearly the same, don’t help matters. Wrapping my fingers around the bar and tightening my grip, I take a deep breath. These sounds don’t seem to bother the other people. That means they’re just in my head. And if it’s something that’s just in my head, that means I can control it. I take another deep breath. The car arrives at the upper area.

I let the others go to the more normal places, the observation area and the park-like place where the people who run this place have picnic tables set up. I head the other way, towards a small clearing I stumbled upon the second time I came here, entirely accidentally and quite literally. Heading down the hill and through a bush, I come to the familiar small semicircle of trees and bushes that meets a cliffside. I smile. It’s as empty and calm as I remember. I start to breathe once more. To stop my brain from overloading. Just in and out. I keep my breath even, not too rapid, nor too slow. Not too deep, nor too shallow. Just in and out. I make certain not to start counting anything. Making this exact would be distracting. Just in and out. I get into a rhythm. The breaths flow evenly and in time. Everything else fades away. Just in and out. I forget the thoughts rushing about my head. I push the quiet noises of nature out of mind. Just in and out. Faintly, as though from a distance, I once again hear the hum. It’s in my head. I turn it off. Just in and out. My breathing is all that matters in the universe. A steady, calm, cyclic flow of air fueling existence. Just in and out.

Finally calmed down, I settle in. I realize it worked. I could turn the hum off. That has some problematic implications for what is going on, but on the plus side, assuming I can do it on a grander scale, it might mean I can live my life. What’s left of it, anyways. I remember why I’m here in the first place. The robbery. The bullet. The hospital. My life is kind of screwed. Not because some idiot robbed my bank. Not even because that idiot shot me in the chest. After all, the bullet managed to miss pretty much everything important. The doctors said that was the luckiest bullet wound they’d ever seen. Unfortunately, a lucky bullet wound is still a bullet wound. And the hospital’s bill is going to kill me.

Alright, I think. If I can pick up some extra shifts, and cut back to one meal a day, I should be able to afford the minimum payment. For the rest of several years. Lovely. I thought I’d escaped this horrible debt shit when I knew better than to try to go to college. Not a productive thought, I scold myself. The buzzing returns, closer this time. I shut it down again. “Shit,” someone yells. I ignore it. The car’s next journey down is in five minutes. The one after that isn’t for a half hour. I let the touristy types leave on the next tram and wait for the later one. After five minutes in the clearing, I head back to the paths above. The observation area is empty. There’s still a couple in the park area, eating what appears to be a romantic lunch. Gazing out over the portion of the city I can see, I can’t help but think about how small everything seems. I push that thought away. Such thoughts often lead me to dark places, and I don’t want to go there. Productive thoughts only, I remind myself.

Time passes, as I plan out my week. Eventually, it’s time to leave. The car will be at the top once more soon enough. I head over to wait. I can see the car. The quiet buzz starts getting louder. I shut the noise down. The hum quiets. The car stops. Something is wrong with it. That can’t be. I have things to do. My first step in the carefully constructed plan for surviving society is in exactly an hour and it’ll take most of that just to get to my friend’s place. The car has to get here on time. I begin to think about how I could still manage to grab shifts at her cleaning service if I’m late. Not a good start, but perhaps blaming the buses could work.

The car arrives. Two people get off. Another couple, by the looks of them. I walk into the car. The last couple enters as well and the car begins its descent. The dulled buzzing and the feeling are both there, but now that I’ve had the time to focus, I can deal with it much better. Well, the buzzing. The feeling I’m getting is messing with my balance. I realize something. What if it is also in my head? I try to quiet the feeling. Reaching out to where the feeling is coming from, I feel the disorder and put it to order. A few things happen. The car begins to move a little faster. The hum gets a little louder. And the couple curses as the jerky acceleration causes their phones both to fall out and hit the floor of the car. I chuckle silently to myself. It feels much better.

I get to the bus stop outside. The buzzing is once more quite loud. It feels near deafening, though now that I know it’s only in my mind, I don’t think it will actually contribute to hearing loss. Closing my eyes and taking a breath, I reach out and silence it. After a moment, it goes away. I open my eyes. I don’t see any lights on. That’s weird. The buzzing returns. As do the lights. Seated at the bus stop, I can’t help but think they’re related somehow, though I’m not sure exactly how they could be. To test it, I keep my eyes open as I try silencing the loud, pulsating hum. Sure enough, the lights flash then blink out, and the hum quiets. Curious, I muse as the bus arrives. I let the hum return, if only for the sake of traffic.

Climbing into the bus, just like before the loud pulsating buzz quiets. Just like in the cable car as well. Interesting. I sit down in the middle of the bus. Getting in and out quickly is what’s important for the moment. The bus will take me to the main line, which then I can use to go to my friend’s area of the city, then a different local bus will take me to the center out from where my friend runs her business. Simple enough series of steps. Assuming nothing goes wrong. Though, knowing how this week’s been going, I doubt I’ll be that lucky.

Sitting on the bus, I begin to get the same strange feeling. Which gives me an idea. If my silencing the noise affects the lights, perhaps my stilling the feeling affects the world as well. And when I stilled the feeling in the cable car, it began moving faster. So, reaching around for the feeling’s source here, I begin to carefully align and make ordered all the disordered aspects of that source. It seems a little more complicated than the cable car, but with some effort, I manage it. The bus doesn’t get faster. In fact, it seems to have stopped entirely. “What the hell,” the bus driver says. I look around, curious. I repeat the driver’s sentiments upon seeing what’s happened, “The heck?” I mutter. See, the bus stopped for a very obvious reason. It’s a good three feet off the ground.