Ah, Noise: A Brief Refuge From the Mind
The story is not about weakness, but about choosing what keeps you functional when clarity turns cruel.
Rhythmic music plays on his phone. A video shows a drill sergeant putting a recruit through hell. He watches without reacting, then puts the phone away.
Silence drops like a weight. His ears ring—thin, electric, mean. The quiet doesn’t soothe; it exposes. It opens the door.
The first thoughts come like insects: small, fast, everywhere. Bad decisions. Wrong turns. Moments that stuck to him. Work, again his boss smiling while pushing a knife in, and him standing there, swallowing it. A colleague’s cheap cruelty, and him doing nothing. His ex-girlfriend turned the breakup into his confession; blaming him despite her anger, calling him the problem, accusing him of poor communication while she punished him with days of silence over a broken glass, a careless joke, a breath taken the wrong way.
The mind doesn’t remember; it prosecutes. It drags him back into rooms that no longer exist and forces him to stand there again. It makes him rehearse lines he never said, scripts he’ll never deliver. He wins the argument in his head. He humiliates them. He walks away clean, untouchable. He rewinds. He repeats. The same scene, the same rage, the same hunger to rewrite what can’t be rewritten.
He told himself it was a good deal: less screen time, more reality. As if reality were a virtue. As if it were safe. It wasn’t. Reducing screen time was a bad deal. Staying closer to reality was a mistake.
Reality is merciless. It’s a place that takes. It doesn’t offer quiet moments. It doesn’t bargain. It doesn’t let him rest. The phone wasn’t the trap. The phone was the cover. The phone kept the worst part of him asleep.
Then he has a moment of lucidity, a rare occurrence.
He grabs his car keys. Outside, the air is cold and indifferent. He gets in, starts the engine, and drives. The radio stares back at him, keeping him one button away from noise, from anesthesia. He tries not to touch it. He tries to stay present. But his thoughts crawl back in anyway, and the road turns into a tunnel.
Highway lights flick past like a pulse. His clarity comes and goes, flickering, failing. And then, in one sharp moment, it holds long enough for the truth to speak.
Why keep spending your life like a wage, working, surviving, tolerating, when it ends the same way regardless? One day he will die, and whatever he did will collapse into nothing. Once he is gone, everything is gone. Once he is dead, time is dead too. The world continues, but not for him. For him, everything is finished: people, memories, victories, shame, all sealed shut.
So why?
He looks at the radio, then back at the traffic. He thinks hard for a while, and then, without hesitation, he presses the On button.
Music fills the car. Voices take the place of the voices in his head and make them drift, slowly, away.
Ah, noise—a lifesaver.
A.O. Homorodean
Sometimes the phone, the scrolling, the constant input aren’t addictions first; they’re defenses, delaying collapse.