It's two-thirty in the morning, and the lights in the living room have been extinguished for now.
Outside it is dead: no high heels clumping against the pavement, no shouted drunken invective, no distinctive sound of tyre struggling to turn through a slick of rainwater.
The background noise of our waking hours has been temporarily suspended: there's only my intermittent hammering against the keyboard to break the silence.
Most of my life, I long for these little islands of solitude. The more the tender, discerning ear is enraged by the dissonance of layer upon layer of sound, the more appealing is its opposite.
I spend so much time dreaming of the vacuum which repudiates noise that it becomes an objective in itself. I want to shut out sound in the same way that a curtain curtails the light.
These early hours, then, should be a triumph, a source of ecstasy, for even the birds' conversation has halted. The conditions which I long for are more-or-less visited upon me.
Yet I feel a growing sense of unease. I find myself listening hard for the sound of my own breathing. Suddenly, I want to talk to someone, anyone, about anything.
At the very moment when the wished-for state is attained, it is suddenly no longer desirable. In the case of silence v sound, any sound at all is preferable to the prolonged hush which hangs heavier and heavier. Without knowing it, then, I have completed the most manic calculation of the capitalist thinker: there is nothing more alluring than the exact opposite of what one currently has.
This the methodology which sells skin-whitening cream to dark-skinned people, and skin-darkening cream to light-skinned ones. The bet had been backed, and then the capitalists laid it, winning no matter what.
I, who possess a store of bitterness as deep as the self for the capitalists, I have been caught in their mechanism, and when I am writing I long to do anything but write.
