The day music died
I used to play this game in my head where I’d guess how the world would end. Nuclear war, global warming, and the killer robot rebellion usually found themselves near the top of my list. Hell, even the zombie apocalypse seemed plausible at times.
Turns out I was way off.
I couldn’t tell you how it all happened. No one really knows. Everyone I’ve crossed paths with inevitably shares their own theory on it all. It’s a regular rotation between a “government bioweapon,” or “mother nature’s revenge,” or “God.” Once you’ve heard a few theories, you’ve heard them all, but theories don’t help much anymore.
The truth is, none of us know why the entire world has gone deaf. What we can agree on is that after we all lost our hearing, our humanity soon followed.
Even in the current state of things, I like to think that there’s still a tireless soul living out there in an underground lab, desperately trying to come up with a formula for mankind’s comeback; and I like to think that they’ll figure it all out one of these days. The human race is well overdue for some good news.
Five years overdue to be exact.
Not everyone lost their hearing at the same time. There was a drawn out period of fading away before complete radio silence. One night, after the first cases were hitting the news, I came home from work and noticed that my neighbor, Marcus, had left his front door wide open. Marcus and I never talked much aside from short chats in the elevator, but I felt compelled to venture into his apartment to check on him. That was my first real glimpse at what was in store for all of us.
A few steps after entering, I could see Marcus on his knees in front of his stereo speakers, the right side of his head and body drenched in viscous blood. He had dug what looked to be a screwdriver deep into his ear. The LCD screen on the sound system in front of him showed the volume at MAX, but Marcus couldn’t hear a thing.
I watched as he jabbed and twisted the wet tool deeper into his head. I tried mustering up the courage to approach him; I even walked within a few feet of his backside, but before he could turn around, I left. I closed his apartment door behind me and texted for an ambulance. No one showed up until the next day. Marcus left our apartment in plastic.
Around the same time, I would take nightly walks around the neighborhood. It was a tough habit to break, even with the early signs of the end all around me. It turns out that my neighbors didn’t take too kindly to it. With each night out, more and more eye watched me from between the window blinds of suburbia. Paranoia was spreading like a disease. No one couldn’t hear if someone was testing their window locks or even kicking down their front door, so barricades went up and people never came out. They just kept watching, waiting for their version of the boogie man to show up.
To their credit, violence soon became so prominent that they were longer paranoid, they were realists. But wooden weren’t enough to keep the bad people out.
Eventually, I stopped taking my walks.
After about a year since the first reported cases of this phenomena, various news outlets would tell us that every person in the world had gone completely deaf. There was no going back. Rape, robbery, and murder became the new normal. Looking out my 8th story apartment window at night, I’d see the flashes of gunshots and sirens all around me until the sun came up, then I’d see more. Once the madness hit its stride, it never stopped, and it never regressed. The police, the government, the military, they all tried to keep the peace, but eventually they just gave up and joined in on the fun.
I never quite understood why things fell apart so quickly but then again I was born deaf. I was used to the silent world, so maybe I couldn’t grasp what everyone else had lost. Maybe people needed music and TV and internet influencers to drown out their own insanity. Without the background noise, people could really hear what was on the inside.
Or maybe the human race was just waiting for any excuse to implode and we finally had a flame strong enough to light the fuse. But like I said, what are theories worth now? I don’t try to understand the way things are anymore. I just try to survive.
I couldn’t tell you what the future holds for us, us being the few of us who are still alive and relatively sane. Staying in one place doesn’t work anymore. We scavenge, we fight, journey from nowhere to somewhere, looking for nothing in particular, and then we do it all over again.
I’m not even sure why I’m writing this. I guess I figured if anyone had been living under a rock all this time, this would get them up to speed, or maybe writing just helps me drown out the noise.
All that being said, I still have hope. I have hope for something better, something brighter. Hope keeps you moving. Hope keeps you alive. Without it, you’re not just deaf, you’re blind — forever destined to wonder the dark.
