My eyes flutter, blurry and weary. A prickly sensation trickles down my arm, and I realize I am shivering from the cold.

I groan, my yawns incomprehensible and low, yet they vibrate against the walls. A yawn that would normally deafen one’s ears. I don’t hear it. The right side of my body’s pressed against the bed, my neck crackling with sharp slivers of pain as I try to get myself up. I look at my watch on my nightstand—it blinks six forty in the morning.

I harrumph. I am not letting this pain drag me back into bed, drowsy and delirious. I sit up, take a deep breath, unable to feel it puff its way through my chest, and stand up, my knees immediately alighting with the fires of rekindled pain.

I shake my legs as I walk, stampering towards the bathroom. I close the door but do not hear it click. I turn on the tap but do not hear it rush down the seemingly eternal hole in the sink. I put one hand under the flow of water, and it feels warm, but I do not hear the crashing sound as it plummets against my palm. I flush the toilet, and I think I’m done. But I know that I cannot hear the water whirring down that same eternal hole, so I go back and check, my eyes turning round with the water’s aggressive spins.

I go back to my room, pick up a quite very peculiar device that tends to be cold in the morning, fresh to wear. I clip on its battery to the bottom, and I massage the area just above my left ear. As soon as I find that little sensitive bump, I draw the magnet from this device and let it connect. The rest of the device hangs on my ear.

Muffled static.

I hear the tick-tocking of time, I hear the indicator tick on as the cars wait at the signal in front of my house. I hear my beaten-up clock on the wall turn the smallest hand towards seven.

Most of all, I hear the fan whirring. I don’t bother looking up to check—I reach for the switch.

My beloved cochlear implant, I thought evenly. Fifteen years of sound, plus two years of silence. This gratefulness allows me to dress without slight annoyance, the soft wrinkles of my clothes fading into the background that is the tornado of clangs and chimes.

All the sounds that encompass this world come crashing through one hole in the side of my head, and I flinch, letting these sounds settle in my mind. Until then, I am faced with the prospect of a possible headache, unable to differentiate each of these unique sounds.

I take a deep breath, trying to ease my mind at bay. I hear my name, sharply echoing through these walls, bouncing towards my ear again. I wince, my face awfully scrunching up, contemplating whether to cover my ears with my hands. Instead, I reach for my left ear and remove the magnet. Silence drapes over me quietly and softly, strangely comfortable when it was wrought upon me so quickly.

I sigh and put it back on. Regardless of the temporary relief it gave me, there was no chance I was going to escape the day and its tortuous sounds.

I walk down the carpeted stairs, my feet pounding on the steps, booming loudly no matter how slow I went, no matter how light I delude myself to be. Every step feels heavy; they rumble through my body and make what I think is my soul shiver.

At last, I reach the marble-tiled floor, bare and freezing in its ungodly, achromatic hues. Once I walk across the floor, my feet, immensely bathed in sweat from the heat that makes you sleepy, stick to the floor. When I lift my feet, they create a sucking sound—a sound that’s riveting and yet so repulsive. I grit my teeth softly as I sit down, hating how each step I make towards the table sounds alien.

In the kitchen, the dishwasher is unloaded. One morning simply does not go by without premiering this musical. Ceramic cups clink with glass bowls, the rice cooker creates the biggest clamor of them all.

Again, I bear this with another smile and silently eat my breakfast as the house is thrown into chaotic dismay. Mail and markers across the table, water bottles seeking refuge in places of peculiar oddity accompanied by dishes long assumed lost, a handful of conversation exchanges in the form of panic.

Where’s the folder? Where’s the backpack? Where’s the charger? Where’s the lunch? Where is anything I need?

I quickly tie on my boots, which helps my feet thunder, blasting through the earth as I enter the garage, where sunlight pours in.

I grumble. This time, some truck is here, stranded. Even with the maddening and devoting respect I hold for these workers, their trucks could not be more alarming than they already were. If someone needed help waking up in the morning, any truck with a siren is more than sufficient—their sirens blaring through the streets as neighbors clumsily walk around, trying to assess the scene.

I open the car and slam the door shut, and I lean into the seat, smiling a little bit with relief as, for the first time since I wore my cochlear implant, peaceful silence was restored.

I close my eyes, and find it regrettable to think I was free. My father enters the car, and his phone is on full volume. Some man, whose voice is ever so husky, raspy, and unbearably loud, lets his voice boom through the car. His backpack jerks around in the backseat, the zippers jangling, making this awful off-tune chiming. The engine stirs, and I cross my arms, letting the road’s bumpy drags wash me away.

I set a schedule in my mind. Tuesday. I had evening classes that ran late.

I wake up to my school’s lunch period. Everyone is outside, on the plaza, laughing, eating, cramming before the dread of third period settles like a dark fog over these cheerful students. If their voices were muffled before, they are amplified annoyingly even more when I open the car door and slam it behind me once more.

I walk inside, to the darkest, quietest, and most coveted classroom—the classroom of eleventh grade Honors English, lit up by rainbow LED lights. Basked in its soft glow was my friend. I smile and pull out a chair in front of her, grateful that this chair refuses to scrape along the floor to make a sickening screech, and instead stays quiet, creaking softly as I throw my weight on it.

We exchange casual talk. Eleven forty-five hits, my English teacher looks up from her book. My friend sighs, upset that our usual time together is up, and I promise to see her tomorrow. She wishes me luck for Honors U.S. History, quickly telling me we have a couple group activities.

Once I’m in the closed hallway, I make a dash for my classroom before the crowd swells towards the back of the single hallway with ten classrooms in total. Hundreds of students are pushing against each other, yelling at each other to move, screaming goodbyes to friends, shouting to relieve exam nerves. The hallways are very narrow—hardly two meters wide—and I silently wish I could talk to the architect of this campus. The narrower the hallways, the more sound vibrates easily to create a whole broken, off-tune concert. I’m not the first to complain, and I doubt I would be the last.

I walk in, and my history teacher’s voice booms, although he is on the other side of the room opposite the door. I keep a subtle face; I don’t want to let him know he was quite loud—that the people behind me in the hallway had frozen in fear of his voice.

I drop my phone in the calculator holder. Number twenty.

That determined my seat—in the very front of the board—with four other people sharing my table. My classmates of hardly two months.

My teacher pauses for two minutes past the bell; a couple boys with low snickers traipse in. He doesn’t pause—he steps right in, his tone full of highs and lows and sound effects to keep us engaged, telling us the stories of the Second World War in harrowing detail, trapping me in his voice with the promise of a true horror and thriller tale. Still, I pull back, tired of keeping up with his voice, of wondering where the important and the trivial details were. I stop bothering to write annotations in the text he gave us, silently promising to finish it on my own later. For now, the best thing to do is force myself to listen.

“Talk with your groups about it,” the teacher says, “and we will come back in a couple minutes.”

The back row of the classroom, where friends are actually united, ripples with giggles and flirty glances. The front row groans, leans back in their chairs, and proceeds to watch each other, waiting for that one extrovert to speak.

This time, I am willing to speak, and my group mates are grateful. Their faces bob up and down, their lips turning into smiles of heavenly relief, and they quietly mutter a sentence or two after I finish.

This sort of conversation continues for an hour with multiple questions, with the front row dully quiet as the chatter of the back travels towards the front. One fifteen—we are done.

Some people open the door outside, and I follow up, my face hit by the hot winds that begin to create a blurry racket, preventing me from hearing anything else. What’s worse, people are screaming again. We’re outdoors, but it seems that the winds carry their voices to make them rise higher.

Thankfully, the same classroom is my Advisement classroom. Unfortunately, it’s not seen as a study hall and rather more of a game day. I don’t fully complain—I connect my computer to my cochlear implant via Bluetooth and doomscroll Spotify.

An hour and a half later, I walk outdoors, the wind finally having settled down but the voices of my screaming friends clearer.

I amble my way down the hill to the main college campus of our middle college high school, which is strangely quiet, even as cars speed past me, rushing to pick up their kids, wailing with cries of being stuck at school.

I reach the campus, walk towards the cafeteria, pull out my computer, and allow myself to be absorbed into music again. In these solemn afternoon hours, the cafeteria remains empty due to preferences for morning or night classes. Using this to my advantage, I let total silence sweep over me again.

I find nothing hollow, nothing eerie in this silence. A person at the end of my time here comes by and plays the lone piano near the entrance, and even when they play, they always play a low, dull tone. It makes me feel that perhaps I’m not the only one trying to get a reprieve from the noisy cloak of air that had enveloped me before.

Six o’clock blinks on my phone’s blinding screen. I sigh and hear a chorus of multiple clacks and crinkles, and I immediately know that the vending machines that just appear to be in every corridor and hallway are being tormented by dozens of college students looking for a late snack for their evening classes. Without hesitation, I go outside of the cafeteria as the sky is tinged with a dim orange.

I walk to a two-story, pale ivory building to the north side of the campus—the lab building where many science classes are held, and where many lectures are presented. Unfortunately, today is lecture day, which means, I think wryly while walking in the direction of the other classroom, that I would be spending the next three hours in this tiered seating lecture hall.

As there is a small class, everyone is dispersed—more dispersed than gas particles could ever be. I am more than five seats away from my nearest classmate in the same row, and three tiers below another classmate.

At least I could struggle through my professor’s lecture alone and in dark silence as she switches off the lights, the huge screen lit up with a presentation worth, as she admits, a hundred and one slides. She warns we will probably need to stay over time.

I bear no grudge towards my professor, yet her lecturing voice leaves no mercy for me, with her lack of pauses, her unwillingness to slow down, and the intricacy of her word choice. It is a time where I do not find myself alone; everyone else is scribbling away almost aggressively with eyes full of despair and desperation to catch her every word. Hence, even if we are so far from each other, the sounds of pens scratching, Apple Pens clanking, and a lot of clicking and typing premiere a new level of concert within these spacious walls.

It’s in the beginning and end of these lectures that we try to speed up our notes—at first with driving motivation, and at last the pangs of regret kick in due to procrastination.

Normally, when a professor says “You can go,” you’d expect students dashing noisily for the door. But evening classes are on a different level. Each student is worn out to the bone, eyebags dangling, shoulders slumped, posture slouched, stomachs growling, mouths muttering, hands twitching, feet dragging them out. One by one, each of my classmates walks heavily and groggily towards the door at the very top, their backpacks bulky and hanging low.

My phone buzzes—my father is back. Judging by how he chooses to not call me, instead messaging me, I guess he was on a phone call. I walk up to the parking lot, empty and coarse except for a couple sprinkled cars across the vast space of asphalt.

I spot the car, close the door again, and am greeted by another voice on my father’s phone, this time professional but with an extremely strong accent that requires a lot of attention and effort to listen. Otherwise, it might as well be a jumble of odd-sounding words. Engine hums quietly, the car gives out one final beep, and we are back on the noisy road.

You’d think perhaps in the middle of the week there would be no traffic beyond nine in the evening, but there is a horde of all sorts of vehicles just trying to get home. With the lack of patience that wanes as the day drags on, honking becomes the night’s most popular music—one that ensures everyone is awake until the end. I couldn’t close my eyes, and I didn’t want to remove my cochlear implant; try as they might, I still valued sound, even if it is irritating, to keep myself grateful in its presence.

Once we are home and the garage garbles with a series of clanging, my father finally cuts the phone, and for a second I get some silence before I go inside the house.

I open the door only to wince, as my mother greets me with wide eyes as she strikes her metal spoon against the edge of the pot. More unhelpfully, the TV is on at volume sixty, and I hear a metal version of “Row, Row Your Boat” via piano playing loudly upstairs, complete with an intermittent boxing rhythm. I shake my head.

I know I have no patience to stand there and deal with the hiss of the pan coming on soon, so I dash away from the kitchen and make a beeline towards my room upstairs.

I throw my tote bag against the bottom of my leaning tower of a bookshelf, which I fear could crash down any moment. I often pray that it does so in the night so I couldn’t hear my beloved books cry out in pain.

I quickly change and head downstairs, where my suspicions pitifully come true.

The dishwasher is on, and I can hear the water gurgle and splash. The pan is on at high heat, my mother cracks an egg and it sparks, creating a dreadful hissing that seems to last perpetually.

I quickly finish my dinner, occasionally trying to calm myself from bouncing from my seat, rolling over to the TV remote on the low coffee table, and switching off that horrid family show where these actors speak in an exaggerated high-pitched tone to generate a higher sense of unnecessary drama. I smile, wishing I could do that.

I say my farewells to my family for my last moments talking to them in this world of sound, and reach back to my room, taking off my cochlear implant, and plugging in the battery.

Silence is what welcomes me, as well as this quiet gust of wind that wooshes over my legs. I don’t question why a gentle draft would occur indoors; I take it as a nightly ritual, as a sign that tells me that everything will be okay—that I won’t be submerged in silence and drown in its embrace before the dawn revives me again.

I lie down, I say a farewell to myself again, speaking as though I could hear myself, and instead, a shivering echo spreads from my mouth to my body, a feeling that renders this a ghostly sensation.

I move on my side, and settle there, letting the warmth seep into me. In that moment, I hear nothing, feel nothing; I am allowed to rest without distractions or disruptions.

Then a random noise comes—some thump or knock—and I jolt, sitting upright, only to realize nothing happened.

I lie down again, my breaths warm as I close my eyes, then open them again. I don’t have a headache, and it takes me a few seconds to understand why.

I’m happy I can hear these things, even if they stress or tire me out. I’m glad I can hear what my friends say—to actually laugh up a painless smile. To hear my teachers’ stories, so that I can raise my hand to share the thoughts I’d always locked up inside of me.

To experience nature in all of its sounds, a constant reminder of the memories of hiding in these bushes, climbing these trees, knocking on doors of friends, yelling names during games, taking pictures during trips.

I smile and close my eyes, my body stiff, my ears tilted, my mind fleeting to daydreams, reminiscing of a future dream of another glorious day with sound on this hushed night.

Truly, even silence has its sound. Regardless of hearing, no one is ever free from sound.
It is the most valuable instinct a human holds—but a gift for me.