The Taste of Noise.

It’s difficult for me to read at home. I have to have silence and little distraction in order to concentrate. But in my house there’s the TV and it’s accompanying library of movies that call to me. What about the wife and son? They’re tough to overlook with her inquiries and his jumping solidly onto the floor every few minutes. There are the neighbors who love to howl beneath our floor when listening to raging techno music. So I try to spend some time reading and writing in pseudo-solitude at the library. Generally, that’s a place that’s kept silent. But not right now. There’s an alarm shrieking that I’m desperately trying to ignore. My silence has been shattered.

I watched with interest when the little Asian man viewed the door that said “Emergency Exit Only.” He inspected the door hesitantly, touched the handle lightly with his thin fingers to ensure no alarms would sound. Nothing happened. Then he forcefully pushed the door open. In that last moment before the alarm went I off, I too thought as he did, that he’d made it through without setting it off. But when he took his first step through the door is when the alarm went off catching us both off guard. As it rang, he came back in and swiftly pulled the door shut tightly hoping that the sound would stop. Then he searched the entire door for a switch or a trigger to kill the sound. After he was unable to locate any device to halt the noise he ran away.  He left me sitting here listening to this noise.