A Type of Experience I’ll Never Have Again

How do I know this? I don’t. But it’s been a long time, and just before they stopped they were becoming far less frequent.

In grade school especially, and especially when taking tests, I would sometimes enter a state in which my hearing would improve what felt like about tenfold. There’d be nothing to hear exactly– because we were all being silent– but I could hear every pencil scribbling on every desk, and when the radiator clicked on, look out.

It’s something I never mentioned in Monstrous, and it’s always a special moment for me when I can pull something out from my childhood that didn’t make the cut. But it would have tied in nicely with my words on the subject of “only when it was silent did I truly wish to hear”. I grew up amid a lot of screaming, and it seems that my ears would at times decide for me that the coast was clear, that it was okay for us to let down our guard and really listen to whatever was out there.