Enough to Grasp

        I don’t know when I first learned about the concept of freedom. I don’t know if I saw it on a bumper sticker, and pestered an exhausted parent until a hurried explanation was thrown my way. Or if it was a word in a textbook, bolded in the margins with a definition that I wrote onto a flashcard and dutifully copied onto a test. The only thing I do know is that when I learned it, I never truly understood it.

          My childhood home was old; beautiful and comforting, but old. The walls were thin, and the dark wooden floors that froze my feet every morning were worn and dented, and sound carried far too easily from room to room. I could open a pop in the kitchen, and someone in my room, on the complete opposite side of the house, would jerk up in surprise. My mother was neither cruel, nor negligent, but she enjoyed silence far too much to harbor a hyperactive child in a house that did not hide a sigh, let alone the screams and laughs that accompany childhood. My mother was a mixture of smiles and stern looks with a hint of amusement until the lights went off for the night. Then, any small sound that betrayed my consciousness was met with a long, suffering sigh, the creak of a bed, and stomp of footsteps that led down to my door. The door would thrust open, and a strong reprimand would bellow forth from the darkness, before the door would slam and the footsteps would retreat.

          Because of this, I’ve always had a thing about sound. I’ve never been fussy eater, or obsessive about deadlines, and I’ve never given much thought to brand names. I’ve never cried over a little spilt milk, and I’m happy to let everyone rush around me as I sit back and wait for the panic to die down. Yet, there is one area in life that I am painfully annoying about, and that is sound.

          I will browse the electronics isle for hours, searching for the right pair of headphones, and if they’re great ones I’ll buy them in bulk. I will trick and scheme, or if those fail, scream and fight so that I may sit comfortably in front of a television, the remote clutched in my hand. I have friends who will hand out warnings and “beware’s” about my behavior to ignorant newcomers - as if I were a mental patient with a dangerous tick - alerting them to my constant up and down abuse of the volume control. It is of no matter what movie is on, or where I’m sitting, or if I’ve eaten enough or too much, I could find comfort in all of those things. Yet, if my fingers aren’t gripping the rubbery buttons of a remote, its control in my grasp, I find that I really can’t think of anything else.

          While my obsession may bother me sometimes, on the outside I tend to laugh it off. My friends would laugh along, marveling at the one area such an easy-going person obsesses over, but while they suspected noisy neighbors, or fussy RA’s, they never quite realized that I was still holding my breath and listening for those footsteps.

          My first taste of freedom came with my first sleepover. Even at ten years of age, we stayed up late listening to music, watching movies, and laughing.
I was a nervous wreck.

          “Won’t your parents be upset?” I whispered.
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          She laughed. “They’re downstairs,” she said, as if that said it all. Since I never once heard their footsteps climbing up the stairs, I guess it did.

          At one point she forced me down the stairs and into the kitchen, and I could barely hear her reassurances over the deep pounding of my heart. When we made it back to her room, I nearly collapsed in relief. She told me I was weird, and I didn’t fight her.

          My friend loved to play the radio while she slept. The concept was foreign to me; wasn’t the radio what you listened to in the car? I stayed up all that night listening, and waiting, for footsteps and a reprimand that never came. The next week, I begged and pleaded until my dad bought me a stereo and a pair of headphones.

          It was as if a whole new world had opened up to me. I wouldn’t have to sit and wallow in the deathly silence of that house, waiting with bated breath for those dreaded footsteps. I bought a Walkman as soon as possible, followed quickly by a CD player. My first television had a small earphone jack on it, and when I got a laptop I watched more movies in that first month than I had in my entire life. When MP3 players arrived on the scene, I’m pretty sure I cried. Even trapped within the confines of those little metal buds, I still felt that this, finally this, was freedom.

          It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how trapped I was.

          To me, college was less of a goal and more of a dream. Some children wanted to be lawyers, some wanted to be doctors; I wanted to go to college, and I hadn’t really given it much of a thought past that. Once I got there, the cliché images of Animal House and Van Wilder faded into expensive books, cheap plastic food, and watching my dorm mate huff and glare every time my computer made that damn startup sound. I would frantically press the mute button, and slam my headphones into the jack, before letting myself breathe. I would curl up around my laptop, my heart skipping a beat every time my shaking finger’s ‘clacked’ against the keys and thought over and over, like a mantra, “Apartment. Apartment. Apartment…”

          Apartments don’t come cheap and while I still had roommates, I thought that this was as close to freedom as I could ever get. At night I would play my music softly, and no one had ever complained. Still, one night while I was halfway in and out of sleep, the music softly filling up the background, I heard the soft tread of feet on carpet, and without a second thought I flipped over and muted the laptop, holding my breath until the footsteps passed up to my door, and then past it. Once they faded, I hooked my earphones in and slid them into my ears, and slowly fell asleep.

          It wasn’t until the next day that I’d realized what I’d done, and I knew at once that my aversion to sound was not going to just go away. I had to deal with this thing that I termed my ‘sound issue’. I sat in bed, clutching my headphones to my chest and my mantra of “Apartment, apartment, apartment,” changed to a soft, rose-tinted vision of a smaller space with only myself to hear any noise I might make.

          I finally saved up enough to get my own place and did so as quickly as possible. I hadn’t been moved in for more than a week when I found myself in the living room, television on mute, and earphones slammed in my ears. I want to say the discovery ‘hit me like a ton of bricks’, but it wasn’t a ‘slap on the face’. It was something that built slowly from subconscious, and then gained traction as it passed over the road block my mind had set up for the thought, and then stuttered forward before becoming less of an idea and more of an absolute truth.

          There was absolutely no one around. I could jerk out my earphones, and I did, immediately quieting the silence with my loud music. I could unmute the television, and I did, letting the drums and ​the vocals clash with the sternness in the reporter’s voice. I let the two sounds fight it out for dominance of the room, and no one, absolutely no one was there to care. The idea turned into a word, and the word bounced around in my brain, and before I knew it, it was not just a word to be banded about, and it was not just something I’d heard enough to grasp, but it was something I truly felt and understood, and it was freedom.