Tropical tinnitus — By alexandra Clemente Perez

art by Ziyi Huang

People say we are too loud.

They don’t appreciate that silence is a foreign concept to us. So much so that when we don’t have a soundtrack, we will make one happen. We will do anything before surrendering to auditory nothingness.

I can’t remember prolonged quietudes from my childhood in Caracas. The sounds of nature continuously nurtured my developing cortex: the babbling of the bevies of tropical birds, the winding wind through the colossal chaguaramos. Layered on top of these organic sounds, the inorganic grumbles of a populous endeavoring to survive: a call on speakerphone over a rambunctious radio show, the clinking and clattering of a leisurely 4pm lunch.

But when it’s 4am in Northern California and I can’t sleep, I am not mulled by melody. I am haunted by its hallucination.

The silence braids itself like a string that feeds into my brain through my ears. It announces its arrival as a high-pitch timbre pulsing through my inner canals. It expands in my head to rattle my cortex with a frequency so high I can’t measure its periodicity. I feel it in my skull, I feel it in my eye sockets, I feel it in my teeth. It hums through my bones down to my toes. This ringing is as elastic as it is never-ending, tying this void to a nothingness within and beyond me.

My tinnitus fills the blue of my room with the red of emergency. An alarm that just won't turn off. I can only escape it by suffocating my ears with noise or drowning myself in a chemically-induced sleep.

I thought my tinnitus was my body endeavoring to reach the homeostasis of its origin, my neurons making up a sound when they can’t find one. I knew for certain it was a hallucination.

Hallucinations are based on what we’ve already experienced: our brain will take memories, break those neural networks into sharp pieces, and reconnect them into systems that do not represent reality.

There is a thread in psychology that claims hallucinations are a breakthrough of our unconscious to our conscious. So once the breakthrough has crested, this maladaptive imagination should disappear, right? I thought so. I believed acknowledgment of the origin wound would suffice, like those stories where naming the ghost releases the haunting. But even after I identify my offender, the offense remained. Vibrating my bones, tainting me in red.

I thought I had done the work. I was convinced I had learned my lesson: that I grew up in sound, and in sound I should remain. But my tinnitus was emboldened by this confrontation. It got louder and sharper, refusing to be suffocated by the noise of my retort.

I took another approach: Instead of drowning the ringing, I surrendered myself to it.

It’s 4am in Northern California, and I am grabbing that red thread. I clench my right hand and pull that string through my head. What comes out are not the welcoming warm waxings of the childhood I remember. Uncoupling the tones that make up my tinnitus reveals noises I have consciously ignored and unconsciously held on to.

The unspooled fibers in my hands release those suppressed memories across all audible frequencies. These replays start quietly, but each new snippet crescendos louder than the last one until my memories drown out all other noise.

I hear my father’s sad sigh after we hug goodbye at the airport. I hear the hungry people rustling through our garbage bags outside of our house in Caracas. I hear my mother’s gurgling frustration after endeavoring to survive another day without water. I hear the tear gas canister sizzling after it hits the ground. I hear the tapping of the gun against the window of the car. I hear my grandmother’s broken beseeching; begging the men who tied her up to please leave us alone.

My brain is not manufacturing this noise because it is unbalanced in silence. This ringing is constructed as self-protection. It is my cortex shielding my psyche from the howling ghosts of home. It is my neurons collapsing those piercing echoes onto this single tone that I can’t turn off, but can’t impale me. It isn’t homeostasis; it’s mercy.

People say Venezuelans are too loud. They don’t appreciate that for us, silence is not a moment of stillness. It is an instant where what we’re running from can catch up to us, entrap us, and drown us out in a wailing wall of sound.

Alexandra (she/her) was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. She is working on an essay collection exploring her experience migrating from Venezuela to the United States. Organizations like Tin House and VONA have supported her work. She was shortlisted for Ploughshares' 2024 Emerging Writer's nonfiction contest. She currently lives in the Bay Area in Northern California, where it is always a little too quiet.