Where Do You Go to Be Loud?
There’s a place you go that no one knows about.
It’s not a place on a map. It’s the parking lot outside Target at 11pm on a Tuesday. It’s the bathroom with the door locked and the shower running so no one hears the screen. It’s the backseat of your car at the lot where you work, parked between the silver Sentra and the gray Corolla, where you sat for forty-five minutes last Thursday and didn’t move.
You don’t tell anyone about these places. They aren’t Instagrammable. They aren’t even really places. They’re pockets. Small folds in the day where you can disappear without technically going anywhere.
And you carry a speaker with you.
I know this is dumb. You have a phone. Your phone has speakers. You could put on headphones — the good ones, the noise-canceling ones that everyone says are better. You could plug in. You could be responsible about it. You could do the thing adults do, which is to carry their entertainment inside their skull and let no one else know.
But you don’t.
You carry a little waterproof speaker — the kind that fits in a cupholder, that you can drop in a pool and not flinch about — and you set it on the dashboard, or the bathroom counter, or the cement step outside your building. And then you turn on a game. And then you let the sound fill the small space you’ve made.
Why?
You’ve asked yourself this. You’ve caught yourself doing it — feeling the small, plastic weight of the thing in your bag, hearing it buzz faintly when you brush past it, knowing it’s there even when it’s off. And you’ve wondered, just for a second, why you’re hauling around a speaker like it’s a talisman. You don’t need it. You could survive without it.
But surviving isn’t the point.
The first time you noticed it was probably not dramatic. You weren’t having a breakdown. You weren’t sad, exactly. You were just — somewhere. In a moment that felt too quiet. In a space that didn’t feel like yours.
The thing about adult life is that almost no space is yours. Your office is theirs. Your apartment is shared with the lease, with the rent, with the neighbor who plays music at 7am on Saturdays. Your car is shared with the bank. Your bedroom is shared with whoever else is in it, and your alone time is shared with the awareness that someone might knock.
So you find these pockets. The five minutes between when you park and when you go inside. The shower. The walk to the laundromat. The 2am when everyone is asleep and the apartment hums with the white noise of other people’s dreams.
And you take the speaker.
It’s small. It fits in your palm. It’s waterproof, which means it survives the bathroom steam and the spilled coffee and the time you dropped it on the driveway and didn’t even pick it up until the next morning. It’s not a good speaker, technically. It doesn’t have the deep bass, the clarity, the room-filling whatever that audiophiles talk about. It’s the kind of speaker you bought because it was cheap and small and you didn’t have to think about it.
But you didn’t buy it for the sound.
You bought it for the permission.
Permission to do what?
Permission to take up space. Permission to make noise. Permission to be, for fifteen minutes, the loudest thing in the room — even when the room is just a car, even when the room is just you, even when no one can hear it.
Because here’s the thing about being a grown-up: you’ve been quiet for so long you forgot you could be loud.
You got quiet in school. You got quiet in your first job. You got quiet at family dinners where your opinions were a problem. You got quiet in relationships where being loud meant being wrong. You learned, slowly, that volume was a kind of currency, and you didn’t have much of it.
So you saved it. For the parking lots. For the showers. For the moments when you locked the door and the world went away and you could finally — finally — turn the volume past where anyone else would set it.
The game is just the excuse. You’re not really there for the game. The game gives you a reason to be loud without having to be loud about yourself. You can blast the soundtrack, the gunfire, the cinematic score, and it just sounds like a guy playing a game. No one has to know that the sound is the point. No one has to know that the silence you’re filling is the loudest thing in your life.
There’s something else, though. Something underneath the underneath.
The speaker is waterproof.
You didn’t think about that when you bought it. You thought it was a feature. A nice-to-have. Something for the pool, maybe, or the beach, or that camping trip you’ll never take. But somewhere along the way, you started to need it.
Because the places you go aren’t dry places. They’re not the cozy, climate-controlled spaces that adult life is supposed to be. They’re the marginal places. The edges. The in-betweens.
The parking lot where the rain pools under your wipers. The balcony where the snow gets in through the railing. The shower where the steam blurs the mirror and you can’t quite see your own face. The kitchen at 1am, where the window fogs up from your tea and the streetlight makes the whole room look underwater.
You keep choosing these places. You keep finding yourself in them. And the speaker keeps surviving them.
There’s something you don’t say out loud about this. It’s the part where you’ve noticed that your favorite places to be are the ones where you almost don’t exist. Where the rain covers the sound. Where the steam softens the edges. Where you’re slightly out of focus, slightly underwater, slightly not-quite-here.
The waterproof part wasn’t a feature. It was a confession.
But you don’t go to those places to be sad. That’s the part that surprises people, if they ever found out.
You go there to feel something.
The game has a story. There’s a character who loses and wins and loses and wins, and there’s music that swells at the right moments, and there’s a kind of rhythm to it that your brain likes. Your heart rate matches the soundtrack. Your palms get warm around the controller. The knot in your chest — the one that’s been there since you woke up, since before you woke up, since sometime last year — loosens for a second, then another, then another.
It’s not that the game is good. Most games aren’t good. Most games are fine. They’re a way to spend time, a way to feel competent at something, a way to be bad at something without anyone watching.
What the game does is give you a body.
That’s the part no one talks about. Adult life takes you out of your body. It puts you in your head, in your calendar, in your inbox, in the project that’s late and the message you haven’t answered and the bill that’s due. You stop feeling your feet on the floor. You stop feeling your breath in your chest. You become a list of things to do, and the list is never done.
Then you sit in the car, or stand in the shower, or lean on the balcony rail. You turn on the speaker. You start the game. And for the first time all day, your palms sweat. Your breath gets shallow. Your chest tightens at the jump scare, or the boss fight, or the moment when the music shifts and you know something is about to change.
You’re back in your body.
You’re here. You’re a person in a space, with a sound, with a story that’s moving. You’re not thinking about tomorrow. You’re not replaying the meeting. You’re not wondering if you said the wrong thing.
You’re just here. With the rain on the windshield. With the steam on the mirror. With the speaker, the small cheap speaker, doing its dumb little job.
The thing is, you’ll probably never say this out loud.
You’ll keep buying these speakers. The next one will be slightly better, slightly louder, slightly more waterproof, and you’ll justify it with the same words — pool, beach, camping, friend with a deck. You’ll find new pockets. A new parking lot. A new corner of your apartment where the sound bounces right.
You’ll keep not telling anyone.
Because who would you tell? What would you even say? That you sit alone in your car on Thursdays and play a game while a small plastic speaker makes the air move? That the shower is the only time you feel your chest rise and fall? That you’ve gotten better at finding these places, better at slipping away, better at the quiet art of being loud where no one is listening?
You wouldn’t say that. It sounds too much like a confession. It sounds too much like the truth.
But here, between us, between you and the speaker and the parking lot and the rain — let me say it. You’ve been building a small, portable life. A life that fits in a bag. A life you can take with you when the lease ends, when the relationship ends, when the job ends, when any of the bigger structures that are supposed to hold you decide they don’t want to anymore.
You’ve been practicing.
And the speaker is just the smallest, lightest, most waterproof version of everything you’re carrying.
Some nights you’ll forget the speaker. You’ll get in the car, or step onto the balcony, or stand in the bathroom with the shower running, and you’ll realize it’s not in your bag. And for a second, your stomach drops.
Not because you can’t play the game. You can play the game on your phone, on the screen, with the tinny little speaker that’s already there. You can use headphones. You can do it the responsible way.
But you don’t want the responsible way.
You want the small, dumb, waterproof way. The way that makes a little more noise than it should. The way that takes up just a little more space than necessary. The way that says, without saying it, that you were here, that you exist, that you have a body, that you have a chest that rises and falls, that you have a place, even if it’s just a place you made up.
You carry the speaker because you don’t want to disappear.
Even when you’re trying to.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
There’s no lesson here. There’s nothing you should do. You don’t need to be better at being alone, or worse at being alone, or different about it in any way. You’re just a person who figured out where to put the sound. You’re just a person who learned that disappearing is its own kind of music, and that the speaker is just the metronome.
Tuesday, 7pm. Parking lot outside Target.
The rain is starting. The speaker is on the dashboard. The game is loading.
Your chest rises. Your chest falls.
You’re here.