Listening II
The sound of fear II
This one hits close to home. Perhaps I kept myself from posting this until it was all in the clear, or until I knew how about what I needed to say.
A few weeks ago I focused on feelings. What feelings sounded like and telling them apart from another emotion. I believe emotion is the keyword here. I’ll come back to this.
During my several failed attempts at writing this entry, the categorization of snow got stuck in my mind. I thought about the ways we see things, and even how the visual nuances make such a difference. It is all about perception. We all perceive differently, for we all have different stimuli when looking at something. Going back to snow, we imagine it purely white, but we know that it is made up of a vast array of shades of white, and for some, a specific type of perceived white might mean something completely different to what it translates as to someone else.
When thinking of emotion, we might need to use our limited vocabulary to translate what one means, or how it is different from another. The emotion of excitement can either be a perfectly ripe (and small-seeded) avocado or a postcard in the mail from a dear friend. We cannot say only one is excitement, but that the emotion of excitement is different in each setting. When imagining listened to emotion, and what emotion/feelings sound like, my mind did not relate as strong stimuli to hope as it did to fear.
A few weeks back, I heard fear in my brother’s voice. I put it together then and there. It was shaky, it was uncertain, it was unlike him. That said, my brother’s emotion then and there made him sound like someone else. However, ten days ago, my family went through our first Covid-19 scare. On Friday evening, my 73-year-old father went to sleep with a fever– the presence of UTI symptoms left the rest of our family at ease. A few hours later, my phone rang. I dismissed it. Ten minutes later, it rang again. The buzzing froze my body. “If it is urgent, they’ll call,” that’s what I reply to when I leave unopened messages. They called.
“Our dad is okay. He’s on his way to the hospital in an ambulance with our mom.” It sounded like my brother, even at 3:30 am in Seville. It was a different emotion, a different type of fear. Is it that when you know the worst-case scenario, you are able to reel-emotion in?
My father was tested for SARS-CoV-2 that same night. Fear does make time go by slower. Sound also takes its time. “No news, good news,” they say. Each time I heard the vibrations, y trembled as well. My mother’s voice note-fear was similar to my brother’s. There was a grounded calmness in their voices. I could not hear myself, but my attempt was for my emotions to sound like theirs. Was the unruffled emotion a performative sense of a collective feeling? Were they also vibrating on the inside, which translated into a harmonious way of communicating fear?
Sometime after, the results came back negative. Then and there, the emotion was equivalent to breathe, while holding it in during the upcoming days. The fever passed slowly, so did the days, the middle-of-the-night vibrating video calls, and the hours between bedtime and wake-up time. The week seemed to be going back to its routinely-self, with that lingering emotion passed through each temperature check, and sounded through a reassuring voice note: Good morning! 36.5.
