When I was young, I used to lay under the covers and clench a muscle in my jaw that made the ever-present hissing in my ears rise in pitch, just for a moment, and then fall to something like a ringing rain, something that sounded like what the thousands of tiny pinpricks in my vision looked like in the dark. Hiss. Clench. Ring. Rain. Sleep.
I never noticed the hissing until it was quiet, until I was ready for sleep; I never asked about it because it never bothered me. I never noticed the tiny pinpricks until I had to look outside to see whether it was raining—sometimes I couldn’t tell prick from drop.
“Can we see atoms? In the air?” I asked my science teacher in sixth grade, knowing full well the right answer but not being sure how else to ask about what I could see.
“No,” she said, baffled. “No, we can’t.”
It wasn’t for another six years that I would learn the words tinnitus and visual snow—words for the ringing and words for the dots. Words that made sense. Words that made things visible.
I can hear the tinnitus over sounds, now, when I really try, and I can see the snow for what it is, a thin filter over reality that l am always looking past, like a screen over a window. I am always looking past, listening past, thinking past these senses that are ever present, encompassing every part of how I experience the world and yet are somehow negligible, lost in the grand scheme of the way I think about reality.
And yet, it is in those quiet moments, where I hear the ringing louder than the silence I’ve never heard but that I know must be behind it, where there is no rain but I am forced to see the pinpricks of maybe-substance in the air anyways… it is there where I think that this is what heaven must be like.
Suddenly the world is quiet, and the earthly things we’ve clung to are snatched from our grasp, and we are left in the ringing, hissing silence, hearing only God and seeing only God and feeling only God and wondering—how is it that he has been ever-present all along and yet we have never heard him, not clearly, until we have lain under the covers at night and clenched a muscle in our spirit, felt his presence for just a moment, to lull us into peace?
This piece of freeform prose was originally published in the Fall 2019 edition of George Fox University’s student literary & art magazine, The Wineskin.
For the curious: some information on tinnitus and visual snow, phenomena I had no idea I experienced until I encountered them on this Reddit thread.
