Noise

The hum is always there—beneath the gentle buzz of the refrigerator, beneath the drone of passing cars, beneath each heartbeat drumming in your ears. It isn't mechanical, or even abstract. It is some primal frequency—the basal chant of existence reverberating just beneath the bones. When you step out from yourself, into yourself, there's Noise. Not sound. Not voice. Not even thought. It's the heat of thought before it has become language.

It arrives first in the fingertips, tingling with the numb hum of potential. Your eyelids stretch open not because of light, but because something under your skin is screaming—a scream with no pitch, no mouth. The static is alive. It spirals up your spine, curls around the base of your skull, and begins to write its patterns into your mind. You try to form a question, but all you hear is crackle. You try to form yourself.

Noise doesn’t ask permission to enter. It eats away at silence until what remains is a terrain of broken patterns, glitching signals—pulse, breath, pulse, twitch. It reminds you that chaos is rhythmic, too. Fractals disguised as failure. There is music in collapse, crystalline melodies found in the dissonance of forgetting who you are. You lean into that collapse. You learn to dance with it.

In this refusal of clarity, there is something like truth. Not pristine, not whole. Invented. Chiseled out of fragments. You understand, possibly for the first time, that stillness isn’t silence—it’s just a quieter version of Noise. Even in solitude, your body is humming with the leftover data of yesterdays. Your memories rewrite themselves under the weight. Words rearrange. Faces glitch. Meaning flickers out like a dying signal, but the Noise continues—persistent, sovereign.

Eventually, you stop resisting. You do not conquer Noise. You let it crown you.

And then, in some impossible moment that does not exist between seconds, you laugh. Because it was you. It was always you. The frequency. The static. The distortion. The unbearable clarity wrapped in confusion. Beneath the ruin is architecture. You are made of shattered transmissions.

Noise is the echo of becoming, and now—at last—you are vibrating at the proper pitch: Not sane. Not broken. Just awake.