16

I lay awake and listen to the sounds of the night.

The ringing in my ears – that constant single frequency.

The sound that exists under it – a dull roar, like holding a seashell to your ear, only the report’s so low it’s almost inaudible.

The hiss of air from my CPAP machine.

My own shallow breathing.

Sometimes I hear other things, like little footsteps charging over the roof. Possums. Well, it has to be. When I’m in my study, it’s not unusual to hear them leap onto the fence in the backyard. Or, sometimes, if I have friends over, when I escort them out late at night, we see possums on the powerlines, or in the trees.

On other occasions, I hear people walk past, talking. My bedroom is only ten or fifteen feet from the footpath. Their dialogue fades in, then fades out, like I’ve briefly tuned into a radio station before losing the signal.

All these things coexist in the same space as me at any given time. It’s my space, my world. Some move out of that space, like the possum will leave the roof, and the people will move out of range.

When you live somewhere for a while, you identify what’s making sounds, you become  familiar with them, and you feel no alarm.

It’s my normal.

Just like the ringing in my ears.

That low roar.

They’re always there, but when I focus on them, when they heighten in my attention, they grow maddening. It’s almost as if I’m struggling to contain them, and they’re progressively rattling at my being until I begin to lose all sense of physicality, all sense of self, and then … what?

I think about the possums I’ve heard, about the people I’ve heard, and the way they’re compartmentalized to my awareness of existence. Once they’ve moved out of the boundaries of my awareness, they no longer exist – well, to me. But they’re still out there.

And with the people, I don’t understand what they’re saying. I hear their words. I know they’re words. But in terms of distance, they’re just beyond me to comprehend, to articulate back into language.

Maybe that’s what the ringing in my ears is: my conceptualisation of something that’s just beyond my capacity to understand, so it’s transmuted into this ringing.

Listening to it, really focusing on it, maybe my frustration isn’t annoyance about these sounds unrelentingly plaguing me, that they keep me awake, but over my inability to wrangle them into meaning. It could be like any foreign language I hear but don’t understand.

But if I could, what would happen? Do I become aware of things that coexist with me, which I only ever glimpse, which I only may sense but dismiss as some random thought, or which I rationalize into some palatable explanation?

Is there a whole world out there – perhaps even one where they’re aware of my existence – but which I walk obliviously through?

What awaits me?

Or is it nothing but an overactive imagination wrangling with insomnia and restlessness?

These are just some of the things I think about as I lay awake.