What You Hear When Nothing's Playing

The case clicks shut. Your thumb sweeps across the lid the way it does now — checking, even though you watched the little light blink green a second ago, even though the magnet pulled the lid down on its own.

You check anyway. That’s the thing about the affordable ones. The trust isn’t built in. You have to install it yourself, and every morning, you re-install it.

You bought them because you read three roundups at 1am and watched a guy with a podcast microphone talk about frequency response, and you thought: this is fine. This is enough. I don’t need the other ones. I don’t need the ones that cost what I spent on groceries in February.

The other ones. The ones your coworker Shauna tilted in her palm last week like a small, well-fed animal. “Try them,” she said. “They cancel everything. You can hear your own thoughts.” And you laughed, the way you laugh when someone hands you something you can’t accept. You said something about rent. She laughed too — the right kind of laugh, the kind that lets you off the hook. The hook stayed in anyway.

The affordable ones are in your ears right now, and they don’t cancel everything. They cancel some things. The bus becomes a hum. The squeal of the train at 7:14am becomes a suggestion. The woman two rows over, talking about her daughter’s wedding venue in the voice that means she wants you to hear — gone, mostly. Mostly.

You’re on the 6:42 train on a Tuesday. The window is cold against your temple and you press the earbud in a little deeper. Your jaw does the thing — the clench, the one you don’t notice until Thursday, when you’ll have a headache you blame on the screen. The train rocks. A stranger’s elbow brushes your shoulder and you don’t flinch, because the music is in, and the music is the line you draw around yourself in public, the moat you refill every morning.

You picked the affordable pair. You have been picking the affordable pair for years.

It’s not a tragedy. Don’t make it a tragedy. It’s a decision you made on a Wednesday in your kitchen with a credit card you were already nervous about, and you made it the way you make most decisions — quickly, with the right amount of self-deprecation, the way people make decisions when they know exactly what they’re giving up.

You knew what you were giving up. You read the reviews. You saw the graphs. You knew that the other ones have names for the things they do — names like “transparency mode” and “spatial audio” and “the kind of silence money can buy.” You knew. You picked anyway.

I know this is just a pair of earbuds. I know this is not a symbol. I know that the difference between the affordable pair and the one Shauna bought is, in the long run, money. But —

But you also know what it feels like to put them in.

The first time you wore them, on a Sunday morning in April, you walked to the corner store for milk and the world went a little far away. A woman was walking her dog. A man was raking leaves. The leaves were doing the slow thing they do in April, the half-falling, and you could hear them rustle over the music, and for about eleven seconds you were the kind of person who hears leaves. Then you thought: these are the affordable ones. And the eleven seconds ended.

You remember the eleven seconds.

That’s the part that doesn’t fit in a review. The review will say: decent battery, adequate noise reduction, some sound leakage at high volume. The review will not say: these are the ones you can afford. The review will not say: every morning, the case clicks shut and you become, briefly, someone who is allowed to have a private world.

You’re allowed to have a private world. Of course you are. Everyone is. You just have to be the kind of person who pays for it, and you have decided, in some quiet room inside yourself, that you are not that person. Not yet. Not for earbuds.

What are you saving for?

Don’t answer that. You know what you’re saving for. You have a list. The list is in a notes app on your phone and the list has things on it that aren’t earbuds, and you scroll past the list sometimes, late at night, and you think: soon. You think: one day. You think: the case will be different.

But the case is the case. The case is the one that came in the mail in a brown paper bag, with no box, no ribbon, no little foam cutout, no unboxing video in your future. You opened it on the kitchen counter. The plastic wrap was the cheap kind, the kind that fights back. You peeled it off. You put them in your ears and they fit the way cheap things fit — not badly, just generically, the way a stranger’s handshake fits, the way a Tuesday fits. They were in your ears before the matching app finished downloading.

You didn’t tell anyone.

This is the part that should embarrass you, but doesn’t. You didn’t tell anyone you got new earbuds because the people you would tell are the people who would say, “Oh, are they the good ones?” And you would have to say, no, and you would have to say it in a voice that doesn’t apologize, and you have not yet built that voice.

You will. Maybe. The voice is in progress.

For now, you wear them. On the train at 6:42. In the parking lot outside Target at 7pm on a Tuesday, sitting in your car with the engine off, listening to a song you already know, watching the orange light make long shapes on the windshield. Your hands are still on the wheel. Your breath is shallow. The parking lot is almost empty and the song is doing the thing it always does at this part, the part where the singer’s voice cracks slightly, and you feel it in your chest — not the song, the chest — the chest tightening, the way it does when something you can’t name is right at the surface of you.

You have a name for it. You don’t say the name. The name is “I’m fine.” The name is “this is fine.” The name is “the affordable ones are fine.”

They are fine.

But fine is not the word you use in your head when you imagine your life. In your head, when you imagine your life — and you do, often, usually on the train, usually with the earbuds in — your life has a different sound. Your life has noise canceling. Your life has spatial audio. Your life has the kind of silence that makes you wonder if you’ve gone deaf, and then you take them out and the world is too loud, and you put them back in, and the world is right.

In your head, your life is more expensive. In your head, your life is the one Shauna has. Not the earbuds themselves — Shauna isn’t the point. The point is the way she tilted them. The point is the way she said “they cancel everything” like she was talking about a new boyfriend, like she was reporting a miracle. The point is that she had heard silence before, and recognized its absence, and done something about it.

You haven’t heard that silence. You don’t know what you’re missing. That’s what you tell yourself.

It’s not true.

You know what you’re missing because you read the roundups. You know what you’re missing because you’ve stood in the airport and watched a man in first-class sweatpants put his earbuds in and close his eyes, and you thought: that’s the move. You know what you’re missing because Shauna, who is not a better person than you but who is a person with a different bank account, told you. You know what you’re missing, and you know the price, and you decided.

The decision is not a wound. The decision is not a story. The decision is a small, repeated thing, the way brushing your teeth is a small, repeated thing, the way checking your phone is a small, repeated thing. You make it, and you move on, and you don’t think about it, and the case clicks shut, and the train rocks, and the song plays, and the leaves in April rustled, and you were — for eleven seconds — someone.

The case is in your pocket now. The earbuds are in. The world is at the volume you can afford.

You are not, today, the person who hears leaves. You are the person who hears the bus. You are the person who hears the train. You are the person who hears her own jaw clenching and calls it Tuesday. You are the person who picks the affordable pair and calls it fine, and you have been calling it fine for so long that the word has lost its edges, and you are not sure, sometimes, what you are calling fine anymore.

You are not sure.

The affordable ones work. Let that be true. They work. They play the song. They hold a charge. They survive the trip in your pocket next to your keys. They are not bad. They are not a punishment. They are the ones you can buy without a small voice in your head counting to thirty.

But here’s the part you don’t say out loud. Here’s the part that lives in the parking lot at 7pm, in the train at 6:42, in the elevator at 9:15. Here’s the part:

You don’t actually want them to be fine.

You want them to be extraordinary. You want them to be the thing that makes the bus disappear, the train disappear, the woman with the colonoscopy disappear, the whole world disappear, the way the reviews say the other ones do. You want to put them in and have the eleven seconds last. You want to be, on a Sunday in April, the person who hears leaves, and not have the eleven seconds end.

And the affordable ones can’t do that. The affordable ones do the work, but they don’t do the magic. They cancel some things, mostly, almost. They are mostly, almost, a kind of silence. And mostly, almost, is the story of your life.

You keep buying mostly, almost. You keep picking the one that is fine. You keep calling it fine, and the calling is so steady and so constant that you have started to believe it, and the believing is a kind of quiet, and the quiet is a kind of sound, and the sound is the one you hear, all day, when nothing is playing.

The case is in your pocket. The train is rocking. The 6:42 is becoming the 6:51, and somewhere in your chest, the thing that tightened is still tight, and you press the earbud in a little deeper, and you turn the volume up, and the world is at the volume you can afford, and the volume is, today, enough.

It is enough.

You are not sure.