Tinnitus Love — One Angry Waitress

Sometimes, for no reason at all, it sounds like the Festival of St. Stephen in my head. Bells start going off and I find myself incapacitated by the sheer volume of the noise. It often happens at the most inopportune of moments, during a job interview, say, or while listening to an announcement about the flight I’m supposed to be boarding. Occasionally, a sound will cause it, but at the most disconcerting moments, I’ll be sitting in a quiet room when the gongs start.

When I was just 19, I was told I had hearing damage, and that I’d best be careful about loud music and wearing ear protection around heavy machinery. I followed the latter instruction, but kept going to concerts and soon got a job at a bar the size of a treehouse that hosted live music most nights.

I have no idea what the musicians were trying to prove, but I have distinct memories of trying to listen to drink orders over the sound of the Allman Brothers Band’s Whipping Post, and failing spectacularly. Many patrons were genuinely talented, but for every gifted one, there were three who thought they could make up for what they lacked by just singing louder.

At four in the morning, when I drove home across the city’s empty bridges just as the sky was starting to lighten, there was, more often than not, a residual ringing in my ears and the knowledge that I had traded at least some of my hearing for the bills in the apron on the passenger’s seat.

There’s no cure for tinnitus, and the strangest of things can cause it. Loud music certainly can, but also some medications, like the one my doctor recently suggested.

“I’ve already got tinnitus,” I told her, “so prescribe away.”

“This could make it worse, you know,” she said. The “dummy” at the end of that sentence so heavily implied that I couldn’t miss it.

But perhaps the strangest part of all this, is that it’s an affliction my partner has too. I’ve never put much stock in the idea of soulmates until recently. Now, when we sit across from each other at a dinner and something sets us off: the scrape of a fork across a plate, the going off of the smoke alarm, or almost any song by the band The Knife—the two of us suddenly laid-out on the floor like a couple of strays in the wake of a particularly effective dog whistle, I’ve started to think that perhaps it’s not just about passion and perfection so much as it is the things that we share.

“Is that bothering you too?” I’ll ask him, as he reads my lips and nods, knowing that there’s no point in replying. That right now, I can’t hear a damn thing.