So I started seeing Dr. Humberto Gompf, who proposed using cognitive behavioural therapy to train my brain to essentially just relax and ignore the noise. He didn’t seem to place much stock in my suggestion that the sound might have had a real-life origin in my neighbourhood—like the electromagnetic waves from the new cell tower, for instance, or perhaps a rumble from the industrial park over in Ranchlands. Was I supposed to take medication and do therapy just so I could cope with noise pollution? Was I supposed to train myself to be less sensitive? When did being too perceptive become a liability, a deficit, and who did it serve for that to be the case?

When trying to describe the sound to my doctors, or my neighbours, or to Paul, I came to realize that I could only ever talk about it through analogy. How else could you articulate a sensation that another couldn’t perceive? It was like describing a colour to a blind person; it could only ever be like another sense. Grey like the smell of streets after a rainstorm. Yellow like the heat of bedsheets in morning sunlight. At night, as I lay in bed, it sounded like someone was idling their engine in the driveway. Or like an airplane flying overhead, that low atmospheric roar; except it never got further away, it just kept going for hours and hours. Or like being in a tenth-floor apartment and hearing jackhammering in the basement, reverberating up through the concrete walls. Or the deep rumble of a bass note at a concert, sustained for days.