As a child I used to not hear well. My parents would call me to do things, I would genuinely not hear them and, consequentially, got in a lot of trouble (ah parents and their belief that everything is done to irk them). When I moved in with my mother though, there was a very different way of dealing with my inability to hear my name.
Now, I have a very strong case about human adaptation, and I'm almost certain in a span of four years I developed hyper-hearing into my body.
A lot of people have told me how awesome this is, and I'll admit, it does have its good side. I don't bother the neighbors with loud music or television, I pay attention usually when I'm spoken to, if someone were drowning in the Nile river, I'd hear it. It's practically a superpower.
But all superheroes have their weakness, and mine happens to be the very same thing that is considered a strength.
You'd think that studying art would mean a lot of very quiet people, reserved to themselves, focusing entirely on making their masterpieces. Trailers and advertisements of art schools show focused students carefully studying their subject to make sure to do it justice. Some have fun with it, making messy, broad strokes. Others are silent, viewing every detail and trying to recreate it.
Others breathe loudly.
Mouthbreathers are the bane of everyone's existence, especially when they choose to situate aforementioned existence as close to one as possible. Usually I'm able to avoid people with noisy tics, as these small noises happen to distract me incredibly from my work (and don't let me think at all). But today I could do no such thing, and I noticed far, far too late.
Normally I would just brush off the sudden noise. After all, some people just snort at times. It's a human thing. Everyone snorts at random, just like everyone has skin or self-diagnoses a psychological disorder which they may or may not have. It's part of being human. Soon enough I forgot it, just moving on to pay attention to the discussion of the details of Michelangelo's middle finger to anyone doubting he was the true author of his statues.
But right as we were about to get into the struggle between people pointing out the detail on Jesus' pectorals while fighting against the hooting screams of pubescent males in the back making titty comments, I heard it again.
The grating sound of nasal cavities opening and closing in an attempt to make a stop-motion video of bogey bacteria nearly made my ears bleed. Once more, I believed, it was just a normal occurrence, but before I could process another thought, there it was again.
My ears vibrated with every obnoxious noise. The snorts, accompanied by the bellows of the different words for schlong in the back, only served to interrupt my train of thoughts more and more each time. Every sentence that our educator struggled to stammer out in a feeble attempt to spit knowledge into our brains was interrupted by the snorting. Just when I believed the noise couldn't get any more unbearable...
It didn't take long for it to invade my head, my every thought. Mid-sentence in the discussion and I'd spit out a snort, wheeze and sigh at the professor who looked at me as though I was somehow succumbing to delusion. Snort wheeze. I tried to analyze what could be the cause. Sickness? Allergies? Snort wheeze. Every assessment brought me back to the same conclusion, the same stream of consciousness that lingered in my head like a snort-wheeze lingered in their nose. I felt all sanity leaving me, any logical thought was replaced by the fearful snort-wheeze, every snort-wheeze would snort-wheeze snort wheeze snort wheezing snort wheeze and finally I had enough of it.
Struggling to pull the words together, I managed to repeat them enough times under my breath in a soft mutter until they felt almost natural, and I turned to her, prepared with all my might to beg her to blow her nose, to offer medicine, something. This was it, my time to take a stand against loud snort-wheezers everywhere for the sake of all that was auditory, and yet...
There it went. The opportunity for me to speak out against loudness and I had wasted the entirety of my two hour class literally sitting down and snort-wheeze taking it. But I did it. I survived. Countless others would have succumbed to the insanity immediately. As I write this, I know that my future generations will look back at this and give a wise nod of approval, knowing that I, an average student of average talents with hyper-developed hearing, have survived the snort-wheeze-pocalypse.
-E
(A.N. I apologize for the one-day-late publishing of this. Just pretend it's still March 10, preserve the magic.)
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