Written while holding both my phones upside down like that would change something.
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Lately, I’ve been hearing things that aren’t there. Notifications. A WhatsApp ping. A gmail chime. The hollow vibration of a phone left at the desk. It doesn’t matter that both phones are on full volume. My brain makes up extra sounds, just in case I missed something. It’s like my nervous system is haunted by urgency.
It used to happen once or twice a day, now it’s constant. I’ll be working, typing something that actually matters, and suddenly… buzz. But there’s nothing. No email, no message, no missed call. Still, I reach for my work phone. Then my personal phone. And sometimes, I catch myself unlocking both just to confirm that silence is silence.
I think it’s a kind of psychic muscle memory. Like my brain got tired of waiting and started generating its own alerts. A survival adaptation gone too far. Now I hear sounds no one makes, and feel vibrations that only echo inside my spine.
Sometimes I wonder if the anxiety came first, or if I was trained into it. Conditioned to expect interruption, conditioned to feel incomplete without a task chasing me. There’s something deeply humiliating about reacting to a sound you imagined. It makes you question your own credibility. How can you trust your instincts when they keep leading you nowhere?
It’s not even about the message anymore. It’s about the sound I can’t un-hear.
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