Can you hear it?

It caught me unawares. And I reacted instinctively. Actually, it was not I, the conscious, social, identifiable construction with smooth corners as a result of the friction with others, that presented the reaction. I was something very low, and primitive, but so powerful that it was impossible to resist. Sharp and purposeful lashes of sound invaded me. I couldn’t stop it and I was numb with pleasure. To me it seemed the sound of the beginning, I thought “this is what the first intentional sound made by a human being sounded like”. And it was not I that perceived it, but the deepest core of humanity where the very first bud of culture bloomed into art.

And the result –teeth gnashing, breath stopped, tears instantly welling and a cataclysmic pain in my chest.  My eyes turned towards the source, it was imperative to see. But the next moment I turned my eyes away, for fear they might give me away. I was ashamed of myself and felt the truthful speech of my heart. So I repressed it, and with it the single instance and the only proof of my existence.

The sound stopped. I turned around again to see him lowering his pipe in respectful commemoration of the song he spontaneously played. Nobody around seemed to have noticed it, they indifferently let it fade away, only to make way for the sound of their own petty mundane chit-chat.