For as long as I could remember, I had never heard silence. I had gone to many doctors, but none had been able to diagnose it. You see, I heard music in my mind at all times. Music that I had never heard before. My friends said they wished they had the same thing: a constant radio in the mind. They could never understand. It was a curse, not a blessing.  I learned to write music and play the piano. I wanted to become a musician, my dream as a child. I could never learn any songs because I always confused them with the music in my head. Sometimes I just listened to the music. It was actually very beautiful, never repeating anything, but creating a soft, mellow tune.

    One day in late summer, I was sitting in a café near my apartment in New York City. The café was a small place that is long out of business now. I was sitting, listening to the music, and drinking coffee. Suddenly I had an idea. I pulled a pen from my pocket and grabbed a pile of napkins from the front counter. I drew the staff for a line of music and began writing down the music I have always heard. Over the course of a few minutes, I was able to fill all of the napkins. I left a large tip and rushed home. Climbing up the stairs, I flung open the door. When I got inside, I got right over to my piano and looked at the napkins. I began to play the piece and instantly fell in love with the piano’s beautiful sound. The music in my head was played unadorned on some instrument that I cannot name. Played on the piano, however, it was much better. I played the whole thing. When I was going to bed, I realized that the music was fading. The next morning, I realized what I must do. If I lost the music completely, it would be lost forever. I silently wondered why it was going away in the first place, while I walked over to the café. This time, I brought a stack of paper. I began writing the music. I sat there for hours, just writing the music and went through probably half of the paper. That night, I invited some of my friends over. I prepared the music and piano and made dinner. I wanted to play for them. When they entered, I told them to sit down and listen. I readied my fingers and began playing. It started fast and it was hard keeping up. It then slowed and went all low, keeping the perfect tone. My friends just watched as my fingers danced between the notes like ballerinas in a recital hall.

    After the piece was done, I looked at them. Mark Lillian, a rock climber who I met while hiking the Appalachian Trail, had a tear running down his face.

“It was beautiful,” he said. The other three sat silently. We all ate dinner in silence. The music was getting quieter as I said goodbye. I could barely make out the notes. The next morning, I got up early and began writing the music. I couldn’t hear it clearly anymore and the notes mixed together in a big lump. I wrote as the music deteriorated into plain sounds in my consciousness. I gave up around 8:00 PM. There was a buzzing growing in the background, like a swarm of hornets. The sound grew and it became irritating. Suddenly, the sound vanished. My eyes widened. I was free of this curse. There was the occasional car horn or shout, but no music. I went down to the café and got a cup of tea. I could hear the people talking around me, the shatter of a dropped teacup, and my own breath. I could hear the mice beneath the floorboards and the bubbling of a teapot in the back of the café. The sound became louder and louder still, until I could hear the distant whispers of the Old Ones. I listened closer, falling deep into a trance beyond mortal domains. I woke up and the sky was dark. How long had I been sitting here? I ran outside. Suddenly, under the sky, a horribly loud static began in my ears. No one was on the street. I ran as fast as I could and jumped into my car. Strands of madness pried at my anxious mind as I started the engine. I could now hear nothing but the static.

Driving for miles, I was speeding at about thirty miles per hour above the speed limit. I couldn’t stop. I had to get away. The darkness grew stronger, tearing away the outer layers of my head to reveal my tender brain. Speeding down the highway, surrounded on all sides by tall evergreens, I cried. It started out as a light cry, but grew to be great sobs. My vision fogged in the night. Suddenly, I hit something with such force that I crashed straight through the windshield and onto the cement. The ground was hard and my shoulder stung with a bloody scrape. My lip was bleeding too, and my leg was twisted the wrong way, throbbing like crazy. I sat upright and saw I had hit a deer. Its mangled corpse lay, strung out over the road. It had totalled my car and I had only one option. I called the police. They took me to a hospital and after I told them about the sound in my head, they assumed I was insane and let me leave after a few stitches and being fitted into a cast. The sound had stopped after the crash, and it never started again. Now, I live in the same apartment and just a few days ago, I found the sheet music I had wrote, folded up behind a book in my bookshelf. I think I might burn the music. I have no proof that anything I have just wrote is true, so I guess you’ll just have to try and believe it.