Noise

Feb. 8^th

I have always been rather sensitive to noise. When I was a child, it would drive me crazy if I was watching TV in the living room and my mother would turn on the radio in the kitchen. The noises competing with one another were like fingernails down the blackboard. The sound of music leaking from someone else’s headphones when I’m trying to listen to a movie on a plane is teeth-grindingly annoying to me. When I’m working, I can only listen to instrumental music, as music with lyrics is too distracting.

I find that since K.B.’s death that this sensitivity to my aural landscape has intensified. I’ve listened to music on my phone or on the computer maybe once or twice since the 10^th of January. When I drive, I listen to CBC FM for classical music when that’s on. Even if it’s classical music that I don’t particularly like, I appreciate its wordlessness. It’s as if it is demanding nothing of me; I can just be with it. When CBC FM is playing non-classical music, I switch to the French CBC FM. They don’t play a lot of classical music (at least, not at the times I normally tune in), but given that my comprehension of sung French is pretty terrible, I can listen to the songs without having any clear idea of what they’re about. And that’s fine with me right now.

And yet, my normal mode of being is, during quiet times, to be singing a song in my head. I can’t stop that tendency. What is playing in my brain now is the soundtrack from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Once More with Feeling.” It was available for viewing on the plane trip back from the Bahamas, so I watched it. I always loved those songs, and they captured so well the emotional states of the characters in the aftermath of Buffy’s death and resurrection. Certain lines stay with me—“Where do we go from here?,” “…in Heaven/I think I was in Heaven,” “Let me rest in peace…”—probably because they resonate with my thoughts these days; they are allowed to stay in my brain. It’s any additional music with words that feels like a distraction.