Did You Hear That?
Morning arrives all at once now, like something dropped rather than something that unfolds gently. There is a lack of quiet negotiation between the sleeping and waking worlds. It feels abrupt, imposed, as if the day has already begun somewhere else and I’ve been pulled into it too late to understand how it started. The vessel of modern day communication irradiates beside my assuasive bed already; the screen casts a pale, artificial glow that doesn’t quite belong to morning.
“Not now,” I murmur, my voice barely a breath, but the screen flickers, disregarding my protest. The light feels sterile, almost clinical. The illuminated words appear too urgent to exist in such a small, intangible space. Threat. Take caution. Live updates. They sit there too casually – stark yet immovable, like they’ve been waiting for attention.
There is a strange delay – a fraction of a second where my mind resists absorbing it fully, as if comprehension itself might materialize it. But body understands before mind agrees.
Low and circling, a weight suspended in the air – out of sight; not out of mind. It doesn’t pass cleanly the way ordinary sounds do. It lingers, folds, returns, lingers, folds, returns. There is something rather unnatural about audible persistence; it simply refuses to dissolve into the background. It presses into space until it becomes impossible to separate from the morning.
Overlapping messages stack on top of one another, urgently grabbing out to me at once.
Are you safe?
Did you hear that?
Please answer.
The terms blur into one another, but the feeling behind them sustains. It traverses through my screen, immediate and unfiltered, carrying a distant, uncontained kind of panic.
I’m okay! The sentence flows out too easily, all-natural. My fingers know it before I do, moving with a mechanical familiarity. “I’m okay,” I repeat aloud, testing it, “I’m okay.” There is an expectation embedded within the questions, and this is the only response that seems to satisfy it. But as I look at it, the words feel hollow, like a shell of an answer. Still, Send.
The sky is taut with a web of distant engines humming through the invisible currents, vibrating the clouds with restless insistence.
Again.
The glass pane of my large bedroom-window shudders faintly yet enough to unsettle the stillness. The lively chatter of online class engulfs my space, voices overlapping in excitement. I remain anchored, focused on the curated bubble of digital equilibrium.
There is always a pause afterward. It stretches longer than it should, thin and fragile, like the impending moment that ensues right before something cracks. Warmth floods my chest, skipping beats in urgent rhythms. My hands console one another. Even my thoughts hesitate, as if continuing them might disrupt something precarious.
I wait for the next sound. Confirmation or absence thereof?
The room exhales before I do. Tension disperses, settling into the corners, into the quiet spaces between objects, into me. My phone lights again with a surfeit of “Did you hear that?” The question feels insufficient, almost fragile compared to the load it’s trying to hold. My beady chocolate brown eyes stare, distinctly aware of how small a complex language can become. It reduces something so vast and disorienting into something that can fit into a sentence, into a message, into a screen. “Yes,” I whisper, “Of course I heard it.”
I notice the room in pieces. The walls, unchanged. The faint hum of something electrical. On my screen, a reminder pops up: class. I click the button, and enter the visual zoom classroom. The distant movement of a frame within my screen, contained and ordinary in a way that feels almost dissonant. A door closes softly somewhere downstairs, and even this innocent sound lands with great uncharted weight. It is so precise, so human. Yet it makes everything else feel even larger by comparison.
My laptop clicks to life – small, pixelated faces blink back at me from the online classroom I’ve grown all too accustomed to. I’m asked a question; as usual, the words come to me naturally. On-screen, I see my classmates nodding as I speak, their expressions muted by tiny digital squares. My professor smiles – warm and encouraging yet unaware that my chest is still tightening from the moment before.
My reality outside this frame barely begins to settle. I nod along with the rhythm of the lesson, letting the virtual voices and the 13.3 inch screen hold me upright, tethered to a semblance of normalcy. Imposter.
My phone is still in my hand. I realize I haven’t set it down since I woke – my fingers curved around it as if it’s something alive, as if loosening my grip might let distance rush in. Most of my friends live no more than fifteen, twenty minutes away. They exist in the same morning, under the same pale wash of light, experiencing it too – a shared morning experience, threaded through all of us at once.
Potential missile threats. The same phrasing perpetuates, unchanged, as if repetition alone might make the words easier to understand. But they don’t settle. They accumulate.
I’m okay? Complete but incomprehensible, I watch the words sit there: stagnant. They await solace. The cursor blinks back and forth at the end of the sentence, steady and indifferent, marking time in a disconnected manner. “I’m okay,” I whisper aloud, quieter now, testing if it has changed.
Above, the sounds shift – slightly lower, slightly closer, or am I just more attuned to it now?
I wrestle with my lungs to take a deeper breath. An automatic reflex has transformed into a deliberate act. The conventionally crisp air feels heavier, carrying substantially more than it is capable of. Inhale. Resist. Resist. Exhale. Each step is negotiated from the way it moves in and hesitates to the way it leaves, reluctant to surrender.
Another sound pierces through. This one jagged, close – too close. I close my eyes for a second. The beige chair beneath me is real. The cold phone in my hand feels tangible. The unfinished message on the screen exists, redolent of this unreal reality I never thought could manifest.
I’m okay. I look at the words again. They are not wrong, at all – just fragmented in a way that feels impossible to fix. As if no version of them could fully contain what they are meant to represent. They are just not enough. “Then what are you?” I ask them, hoping for an answer. They ignore me.
Precariously, my quivering thumb hovers over my glowing screen, its surface shifting beneath my touch. Reverberations stretch across the morning in uneven intervals. It no longer feels like something that begins and ends. Continuity, even in absence. The concept of time is altered, less defined. Days merge, marked by scattered interruptions laced with that sound.
Conditioned, I robotically utter: “Did you hear that?” Muscle memory shapes the syllables as if it were preloaded into my tongue. My own voice feels foreign and intrusive in tandem. My phone buzzes again in my sweaty palms; I don’t glance down with immediacy. I stay there, suspended between action and stillness, response and silence. The message remains unsent. The cursor keeps blinking up at me. Taunting. I don’t know if I’m waiting for the next sound – or for the silence to answer itself that morning.
