Am I Listening?

Listening? Of course, I’m listening. Here are some of the things I can hear:

• Someone humming in another room. If I record them and play the recording back when they’re not here will that mean I won’t miss them as much? Nonsense. Missing them so much in advance that I think about recording them is stupid. I’d rather appreciate their humming now and then appreciate the silence later.
• The pain in the lower left of my abdomen. Is it there because I just drank a small glass of tomato juice with a splash of aminos? Is it part and parcel of the twinge in my back that I can hear as I sit here now? I carried a heavy suitcase downstairs. I should know better but I’m not close enough to older to feel the fear. I just do it anyway.
• My back twinge. I already mentioned it so there’s not much else to say. Tomorrow is when the bags will have to be carted from one end of the planet to the other and so I’m thinking that it’d be best to get the taxi drivers, elevators, escalators and baggage handlers to do most of the grunt work. None of them are Sophia Loren.
• My mind humming away about work. I tell it to shut up about that at the weekend. Low-level anxiety can be a motivator to get things done, but not when I’m walking down the road, trying to get back to sleep in the so-called small hours of the morning. In fact, I’d rather not be listening to it now, thanks.

None of these things are you.

I don’t know how to listen to you. I don’t even have a clear idea of how to listen out for you. I don’t have any conception of what you would sound like. If I did then it wouldn’t be so much of a struggle. I know what the breeze sounds like so it’s not difficult to listen out for it. It’s the same for crows, motorbikes, alarm clocks and the scrape of a spoon on a pan.

You I don’t know the sound of.

If there was some kind of a guidebook then I would be properly clued in. We all would be. If you were to tell me that you sound like a tolling bell in the key of D-minor or the rustle of hay at midnight then I’d be able to listen out for you. As it is, I’m listening to all sorts of things without knowing which of these is you.

What do you sound like?

Some say that you can be heard at the heart of all things. Some say that you speak in the silence of my heart. Some say that some are wrong in their suppositions. I’m keeping an open mind.

That said, maybe that’s my problem. Maybe my open-mindedness means that I miss out on the specifics of you. But if I listen to someone’s version of specifics then won’t I risk getting caught behind the barbed wire of ideology. What if I get myself into the wrong concentration camp and it’s the one right next door where I would have heard you!

It’s a tricky business, yes?

It’s tricky even to get out of the habit of asking you questions. Why this and why that. Why, even I know that’s the road that leads downward. I’m not going to go there. But all the same, why the big silence?

You know, if you were my partner and he or she treated me like this then it wouldn’t be classed as a healthy relationship. And imagine if my mother or father stopped talking to me, much less stopped listening too! But anyway, let’s not go there.

In fact, let’s not go on with this pointless non-conversation.

I have heard you now. I have moved away from my computer. I have opened a can of your favourite food. It’s in your bowl. Eat. You’ve certainly earned it for listening to me rambling on for so long.