Two Meters

You don't hear the fridge until it stops, and then the kitchen is suddenly enormous, as if someone took a wall away. That's the ear being honest about what it's for. It keeps a floor under everything and lets the floor rise with the room, so the only news is what's different. A shout in a quiet house is a shout. The same shout at a building site is somebody's mouth moving.

But the little hairs inside don't take the news. They take the weight. Every hour by the generator, every gig I stood too close to, was counted at its full size, whether or not I noticed I was hearing it, and I'll pay in full one day, in the high notes I won't get back.

So I've got two meters in one head: one that moves its zero, for listening, and one that never moves, for damage. Neither one is lying. They're answering to different people downstream.

The sea's like that this year. The wind reads the difference between one stretch of water and the next, so the honest gauge for weather takes the warming out. The coral reads the thermometer. It doesn't care what the rest of the ocean is doing. Too hot is too hot, and it goes white.

I think a baseline that moves is a tool as long as I remember who it's measuring for, and it turns into forgetting the moment I let it answer for someone it was never built to hear.

It's two in the morning. The fridge starts up again. I stop hearing it after a minute. Somewhere a small hair bends, and keeps the count.