Sixty Seconds Without Sound

It was lunchtime on one of the busiest streets downtown: four lanes of traffic, a tram line, two competing buskers, road works one block over. The kind of noise you stop hearing because it never stops.

At 12:47 — I looked at my watch because my first thought was that I was having a stroke and I remembered you should note the time — the sound went out. All of it, at once, like a cable pulled from an amplifier. The buses kept rolling, silently. A jackhammer across the intersection kept bouncing, silently. A man walked past me laughing into his phone and his mouth moved around nothing at all.

I could hear myself: my breathing, my pulse, the scrape of my own shoe when I turned. Everything inside my skin worked. The world outside had been muted.

The strangest part was the other people who knew. Most pedestrians walked on unbothered, chatting inaudibly. But a scatter of us — I counted five within sight — had stopped dead and were doing what I was doing: turning slowly, jaw open, hands drifting up toward our ears. A woman by the tram stop met my eyes and mouthed, very clearly: you too?