White Noise

• Kira Klancevic, Grade 7, University High School -
• Short Story
• 2022

Excellence Award in the 'Summertime Fun ONLINE' competition

I can’t sleep. I can still hear it. Feel it, pounding through me like the steady rhythm of a heartbeat, ricocheting through my body. Pounding in my brain until the beat is etched into my mind, carved in stone. It is like a vindictive, elusive demon that stalks my mind, with an unquenchable desire, an insatiable craving, to make my life a living hell. A deafening and tumultuous serenade of agony. My sorrow weaved into the night sky between patches of moonlight. I clamp my hands over my ears, the blanket muffling my hyperventilating. Then I hear it again. The heartbeat. Rapidly palpitating, piercing my ears and running through my veins. I am still, still as a derelict, dilapidated statue, counting the seconds before it crumbles. I scream into my pillow.

Seven in the morning. I walk down the school hallway, head down, eyes gazing endlessly at the floor. Blurry shoes race past mine, and I can’t concentrate. My anxiety is eating me up from the inside. The boisterous chatter and clamour morphs into nefarious shrieks and ear-splitting cackles. Block it out.

One o’clock. I sit in the examination hall, my foot restlessly tapping against the leg of the chair. I reposition myself for the hundredth time, but it doesn’t quell my lingering despondency. My mind wanders endlessly to forbidden, unmarked territory. I try to swallow my emotions, my discomfort, but they stick like a bitter lump in my throat. The sky dances beneath my feet. Even amidst the silence, I can still hear noise. Block it out.

Four PM. Daylight dwindles into eventide. The noise is unbearable. I long for tranquil silence. I long for the noise to be cancelled out, for quietude to cocoon me in its warm and reassuring embrace. The pandemonium’s absence of noise is a pillar of strength, a gleam of serendipitous hope. I want the clatter of the world to slowly die out. Who am I kidding? I’m talking to myself. Slowly letting go of reality. Gradually losing my sanity. I yearn for the cacophonous commotion of the world will slowly dissolve into white noise.

Block it out.

Block it out.

I place my new headphones on my head. They clamp over my ears, The chitter chatter of the children, the pitter patter of the rain, the shortness of my breath; all of it dissipating, diffusing into an empty void of nothingness, like ashes spilling from a porcelain vase. My muscles finally release their tension. My chest expands, and my head feels light and buoyant. The voices of the outside world slowly fade into white noise.