A Few Thoughts on Tinnitus

I once said it was the hum of distant traffic and rhythm of crickets—it was night that I missed most. But here, days hold an insulated forest, snow falling its second fall from weighted pines. I praise my failing eyesight and the woodpecker drumming a birch—the thirty-second distraction when I forget all but where a sound might come from.

I live in the woods, outside a city of twenty-thousand, in a world of two adolescent boys. My mind is six-lanes of rush-hour traffic.

Still, even if I can slow it down—noise. I can stand at a bluff top, my face full in a wind only felt from such heights, but I never have silence. Always this ringing, always this pitch the doctors say I can no longer hear but that I hear endlessly. I’ve heard it for years now.

I shouldn't whine. I haven't yet taken the claw end of a hammer to my head (not that I know anyone who has). What I mean is, I can handle it, unlike others who are afflicted, but I will say that when I’m out on the back porch in what are the quietest days of the year, I really long for a few moments without a thought or a high-pitched ringing—or a thought of a high-pitched ringing.

Tell me that silence is overrated, will you? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease...