the Universe has been Loud

There are approximately 540 random speckles on a ceiling tile. The rectangular shaped kind that rest on metal frames. Usually they are in schools, or hospitals, office buildings, anything uncomfortable.

I’ve spent a lot of time examining ceilings in my life, inevitably counting the dots to pass the time between Point A and Point B of bell schedules and appointments. I would estimate the average number of dots on a single tile to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 540.

A while back, I read the sentence “forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling.” There are a lot of numbers between 1 and 540, 538 whole ones. And just as many ideas occur within that 540 number process - “forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling.”

At school as a kid, or even now trying to finish the very last semester - I can’t deny that forever wasn’t a thought. On the way to 540, I would imagine stacking up the classroom desks, climbing to push the tile over, crawling into the ceiling, and making a Great Escape. I knew how long I needed to run until I would make it to the neighborhood hiding spot, and I had the route to the airport, ski hill, swimming pools, and grandparents home in Boise mapped out in my head from the 3rd grade on. In my daydreams I would be flying with arms spread like a bird towards the idea of “away” that I had come to know so far.

At the orthodontist I would look at the ceiling and find myself drifting off into the idea of an ice cream parlor, and come to consciousness again when my gag reflex got tapped back into reality.

And when I fell in love, I found the quest for 540 specks carrying me the turpitude of Statistics and to fields in the South of France that I had never seen; that kind of forever was so warm, and smelled of the kind of mountain air that is crisp enough to clear your sinuses. It sounded like the morning song of birds, like me, and the breath of my love standing next to me. When I was in love, I looked at the ceiling all the time - imagining my forever any moment he wasn’t near me. I kept staring at the ceiling for years. After love left, went silent - the ceiling, and the South of France, the counting of specks to make my welled up tears go back in their ducts - were the moments of peace I could still count my way to.

Recently, I was given one of those rectangular ceiling tiles, the kind with all the specks on it - approximately 240 of them. I was asked to paint it. It was heavy, a lot heavier than I had imagined when I pushed it out of the way during my Great Escape. A lot bigger too. I had been staring at this tile with exactly 526 specks for 6 weeks, yet it was taking me nowhere. I haven’t spent a lot of time looking to ceilings as love continued to fade. My daydreams left the South of France, and travelled to a soundproof box in the desert. When I stared at the tile with 526 specks, I could hear myself screaming with no feedback or echo. No one to hear me - for hundreds of miles in any direction. And while I can see brilliant copper colored sunsets, violent dust storms, and the occasional rainstorm outside the tiny bulletproof window in my box - I count from 1 to 526 without the privilege of floating away.

I would accept congratulations for staying focused, but the reality is that I find myself thinking much less about forever, as if I am no longer privy to the story it holds. Or perhaps because when love left, I flew away, further than the ceiling tiles had ever taken me before. This is not to say a heartbreak made me realize my dreams of seeing the world - because those existed far before love made any difference to me. Love just made the world look much bigger, it made light look brighter, smell and taste richer, and touch - touch transcended the sense I had been familiar with and became paired with a buzzing energy that would set fire to somewhere near my diaphragm and make my skin feel like I was floating through a feather duster carwash.

[Un]fortunately, my senses have stayed the same way in its absence.

Sometimes making a frozen pond out of my lungs, too cold to breathe deeply; smell and taste beg for spice, familiarity, and a particular kind of laundry detergent; and touch has focused on being a reflex. Every bump to the elbow elicits a gasp, every hand between my shoulder blades a crawling chill down my spine, a hug summoning tears, and the sun on my skin a vacuum for the bad - I can feel and store the energy to sprint in the balls of my feet almost perpetually.

Chronologically, this is probably part of development - cognition, comprehension, furthering mindful awareness. Normal. And while I accept that may be true - I’d like to believe it is something a little less concrete; that I have experienced a series of events to make my sensory abilities higher than I can recall, or that I have been through something that opened my neuro-receptors to more stimulation. I don’t know science. But I wonder about it.

When love left, I flew. Slowly but surely, from my emaciated fetal position; I picked up my head, and hobbled into occupation. I picked up a book, then another, and let the words carry me, one foot in front of the other. I left home to live in the tropics and try a new kind of school. I found a way to go to school in Central America, and another way in Southern Africa. I found myself looking at city lights, bright and unfamiliar to me. Languages blurred together as latitude and longitude became the opposite of always. Life became the daydreams of flying away whenever the thought occurred to do so, and in many ways, my mind left my body to fend for itself in remote deserts, quiet European suburbs, and silent downtown alleyways.

I looked at the stars, as an infinite series of specks - like a ceiling tile with no edges or shapes or entries or exodus. I saw the stars in Iceland if I remember correctly. I had looked at them plenty of times before - I grew up in one of the best places to look at stars in my unprofessional opinion - but at 4am local time, on the ice covered tarmac of Reykjavik - something looked different, more important. I had received my visa to study in South Africa the day before, close to giving up on the semester until the package arrived at the door. I hadn’t slept in 3 days, having just returned from a bittersweet road trip. Had I packed everything? Was my paperwork in order? Were my flights on time? How to I get to where I’m meant to go in Switzerland again? While walking in the herd of fair-haired people from the shuttle bus to the plane, my questions turned me towards the winter sky where the fingertips of the Aurora Borealis were tickling what I could barely make out to be a small mountain formation. The stars were screaming with elation. Somehow the inanimate cosmos were alive and demanding to know what in the world I thought I was doing.

I shot the response back with my eyes as I blinked away astonished tears. “I’m lost… I just feel like I’m supposed to be going, anywhere, away” and I climbed up into the plane.

The feeling on the plane from Iceland to Switzerland was one I hadn’t felt before that, and have felt only a fleeting amount in the time since - always accompanied by an exhausted delirium. I felt very small, beyond claustrophobic and toeing the idea of a box that kept shrinking with me shrinking within it - or maybe the feeling when I hit water after a jump from a tall height and for a splint second can’t quite tell which way is up. I had an itinerary to follow from plane to plane and borrowed bed to borrowed bed - an adventure to be elated in anticipation of, but I found myself looking at the plastic interior of the plane’s ceiling and willing it suck me up and shoot me back into my bed at the home I had run from two years prior. I lacked a ceiling tile portal to climb through, or even approximately 540 specks to count my way back to calm. I don’t know whether such a feeling of melancholy overstimulation exists in a word - but I know that it was awash me in only the most cosmic way.

Since that moment, more than a year ago to this day, my senses have commanded my experience of the world. The taste of food explaining the desires of the people I am around - salty, sweet, earthy, rich; the smells warning me of which way to turn - foul indicating a time to turn around, fresh baked bread beckoning me ever closer, the tickle of smoke from a fire yelling “come and be nowhere but here and now;” the colors show of dawn and dusk promising more, and the sight of a crowd swaying in time - a message that I am one of us too. Touch has become raw. A handshake always firm and inquisitive, a hug always tight as if it could be the last; and pain now a test of endurance rather than a submission to suffering - gratitude for a sunburn, a relish for the near never sensation of a body sleeping next to mine, and a prickly anticipation for anything set to enter my personal bubble. But sound has set me free - to see patterns in the clouds and think of velvet any time I hear a lap steel guitar, my eyelids perform laser light shows in time with the bump of bass in my ears and the shiver of leaves in the wind is a reminder that at least wind always acts outside of time and space and me.

Whether there is a scientific explanation for this shift in the way information is processed in my body, I honestly don’t know. And even if there is, I’d prefer to keep it perplexing. I’d like to maintain the process of counting ceiling speckles and the infinite number of stars on a journey to clarity - I’d like to trust the sensory signals guiding me now as real, and important, and honest, because they seem to have led me astray far less than words, or promises, or daydreams have.

(The day I returned from the longest moment)