Can You Hear It?

Being able to listen has made me keen. I know this. Listening closely, as a child, to the lyrics of famous songwriters taught me about pain; they painted subtle shades of nostalgia before I was old enough to even know the thing; the necessity of love and loss; the importance of hope. Wild Horses, by The Rolling Stones, is one such song that comes to mind; Cat Stevens' Wild World; Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. I loved them all. Music is important to me for this reason, and others, also. Each time someone speaks, they sing a song of sorts, if you will listen. Glimpses into quiet desperation, loud trumpeted struggles, the modest strum of contentment. I enjoy listening to people talk. My silence becomes the microphone into which they sing. To listen is to understand someone, to frame yourself as they do. Reading is a form of this; seeing the world through someone else's eyes only to realize it's not very different than your own.

Recently I had a homeless man grab at me with both arms, pulling my forearm toward him while he clutched me, rubbing my closed hand against his grizzled chin and face. I look at him, where he sits, uncomfortably on the ground, and I lower myself down, crouched, so that I might meet his gaze. He smells of stale liquor and his eyes look like dirty car windows that had been rained on. Rambled words fall, slurred and staggering from his lips, about his daughters, his alcoholism, and then something in a language that I do not understand. The man tells me his name: Dwight. I tell him mine and I wait. Dwight repeats the phrase and I tell him I don't know what it means. He grows more solmen and more determined and assures me that I do know it. He pats his hand against my arm twice, quickly, like a magacian performing a trick, and motions upward toward the sky. Listen, he says, it's this. The quiet pervades the night, broken only by the gentle passage of a breeze. Stars shine in the sky overhead, in between buildings and parting clouds, and he smiles encouragingly, as though to let me know I'm closer to hearing it than I was before. In the distance there is the passing of cars, rolling waves of rubber against a faraway asphalt shore. Then, the faint static frequency of dead silence, like the sound an old cathode ray television would make when you turned it on, before any audio or video appeared. His eyes alight. There! There; can you hear it? Voices of women engaged in pleasant conversation twinkle like bells when they turn the corner, walking towards us as they leave a neighborhood bar. Their exchange becomes muted as they near, in that way that people cease speaking when they pass strangers in the night, and Dwight and I stop speaking too. I wonder if people do this out of secrecy, or fear, or both.

For what is secrecy if not the fear of being found out?