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?

Sixty seconds, roughly. Then sound returned, not with a bang but with a fade-up over two or three seconds, the jackhammer arriving last like it had the farthest to travel.

The woman from the tram stop crossed over to me and we compared notes right there, two strangers babbling over each other in the restored noise. Same onset, same duration, same private soundtrack of our own bodies. We exchanged numbers on the spot and have texted every few months since: still no explanation, still nobody else believes either of us, and still, both of us agree, glad beyond words to have one witness each.