I can hear the Earth turning on its axis.

I sleep with the television on, and preferably the radio and the lights on too. I get my writing done listening to music, and the noise of people puttering and living their lives coffee spoon by coffee spoon, dishes clanking in the kitchen, and the toilet flushing.

THE TYGER KNOWS BY TRACY ROSS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 104

When I sit down at the end of the day and listen to the quiet between my ears, the quiet is deafening.

I don’t like it. I have nothing against meditation or mindfulness. But I have something against the quiet. It rubs me the wrong way, makes me think of Dylan Thomas, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I grew up listening to sirens, and firecrackers, and traffic, and people fighting in next-door apartments, and car horns, and garbage trucks picking up the trash at the break of dawn.

I sleep with the television on, and preferably the radio and the lights on too. I get my writing done listening to music, and the noise of people puttering and living their lives coffee spoon by coffee spoon, dishes clanking in the kitchen, and the toilet flushing.