-Tinnitus-

The ringing had been with him for almost as long as he could remember. Gerald’s mind wandered and arrived at the painful memory of sleep. Or lack of it. He had often lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling, praying for peace.
“eeeeeee….”
The high-pitched noise emanated from his head. No one else could hear the sound, it was his, a condition known as tinnitus. A result of damaged nerve endings in his ears. Another sleeping pill, the time was 3.00 am, the ringing did not subside. The ringing never subsided.

Gerald reflected on silence, an almost alien notion to him now. Noise was all he knew these days.
“Silence….silence.”
Yes, he had experienced it. One golden memory among a thousand. Before his parents died, they once took him out to the country. Open blue skies had occupied his view as he lay on the ground looking up. A soft breeze had rustled in the long, yellow grass. Apart from the slow breathing of the wind, there was only silence. A clearness had enveloped his mind then. An awesome feeling of freedom. In silence he had escaped.

Before the tinnitus, Gerald had never appreciated the value of silence as he did now. He hummed a few lines of a Joni Mitchell song bitterly. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till its gone.”

Unhappily he brought himself back to the present, once again locking the door to his own hellish prison. The noise continued, possibly it always would. This thought brought tears to his already glistening eyes. Gerald reached over for more sleeping pills. After chasing the tablets down with a glass of stale water from his bedside table, Gerald found himself revisiting his most dreaded waking nightmare. As he lay in misery, tears slowly rolling down his cheeks, Gerald endured. The nightmare consisted of the noise. The high-pitched ringing that he could not escape. In his mind, the noise grew louder and louder and NEVER EVER stopped. The noise became him and he became the noise. Together, painfully entwined, they stretched out into the infinite future. As the sound, Gerald viewed himself as a malignant cancer that would grow and grow, enveloping and contaminating others, eradicating silence forever.

Gerald tried to control his laboured breathing as sweat trickled down his forehead. The noise WAS increasing! He clenched his eyes shut, spilling fresh tears onto his sticky cheeks. He could not let the sound grow! Shakily he reached his hand out for more sleeping pills, unscrewed the cap and shook some more into his mouth. As he washed these down, he spilt splashes of water onto his chest. He felt his whole body start to vibrate and shake as he dropped the empty glass beside his bed.

Gerald concentrated on his noise and realised with a pang of hope that the it was receding. While he knew that his entire body was beginning to tremor quite violently, he noticed a soothing sense of detachment. He felt as if his mind was submerged in a thick treacle. His thoughts were coming slower and the his ringing sounded almost distant. A strange darkness rolled into Gerald’s mind like clouds.
“Quiet…..”,
Gerald thought to himself. The immense sensation of freedom he had once felt in the countryside was rushing back in gentle waves. Gerald thought of sleep, a nice long sleep. He died with a smile on his face.

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