Noise

Prompt for today from NaNoWriMo is "noise"

There’s a noise in my head when she’s near.  It bounces around the confines of my skull, trapped between bone and soft flesh, turning my cerebral tissue into a trampoline as it ricochets from neuron to neuron.  It starts in the occipital lobe, that portion in the back of your head were all the visual information is processed, triggered by blue hair and gray glasses and ears ringed with piercings.  Then ping-ping-ping, off it goes, triggering memories of late night sex when it hits the hippocampus, the ring of heavy metal when the temporal lobes- the sound centers- are struck, the taste and smell of Thai chili as it travels.  A hyperactive two year old on amphetamines, the noise bounces off the confines of my head and I have to blink every time so it doesn’t come crashing through my eye sockets and out into the open.

Sometimes I don’t hear her, because of the noise.  We’ll be curled up in bed, legs entwined, my head on her chest and my eyes closed to keep in the noise.  She’ll be speaking about something, recounting a soccer game or explaining some type of computer system she designed at work, but the white noise buzzes in my ears and I lose track.  I try to focus, to draw the sound of her voice in past my ear drums so it can fill my skull instead, but then the pressure of so much noise begins to press on the gray matter and I have to pick one or the other.  It becomes so intense, listening to the noise and her voice and trying to figure out if I have a voice in all that.

But then, late at night, after our legs had unwrapped and rewrapped around each other a thousand different ways, there’s silence.  Silence in my head at least, as the pound of her heart echoes in my ears and the sound of her breathing fills my head.  The noise in my head goes silent, and finally it fills with her, just her, the sound of her presence not bouncing but rather gliding.  Her noise comes in waves, washing over my brain, and consuming more and more of the space.  It sinks into the crannies, the nooks and valleys and ridges, and creates a protective barrier against the white noise.

It’s then I settle back into sleep, protected and sheltered by her noise instead of the insidious noise of my own head.  It’s then, in the beating of her resting heart and the soft gasps of her dreaming state, that my head finally goes silent.  And then there is peace.