The sound of silence = the sound of my own paranoia

Have you ever heard of those sensory deprivation tanks where you sit in water in the pitch black with absolute silence around you?  At first I thought that would be kind of a cool experience, but now I'm not so sure.  I think my imagination is not cut out for something like that.  It would be kicked into overdrive.  After two minutes I would convince myself that I'm going to be stuck in there forever, that I am being punished for something, that the people in control of the tank are at any moment going to release a shark or a piranha or killer squid into the water to see how I react. 

What brought about these thoughts was the electricity going out on our block tonight.  Being in a new apartment, my roommate and I are not entirely sure of where everything is. We just kind of sat there in the blackness for a minute before launching into action.  Usually in the past when this happened it was because we overloaded the circuit or blew a fuse.  In this place, I don't even know whether it uses circuit breakers or fuses.  All I knew was that I was going to have to step over a lot of crap between where I was in the living room and where my flashlight was next to my bed.  And I cannot even begin to tell you where I packed the candles.  Anyway, my imagination kicked into gear as I was sitting there- it was really dark!  When my roommate ventured into the kitchen to find her flashlight, I sat there in the dead silence and imagined this was all the effort of a serial killer targeting me specifically.  Once I brushed off the serial killer scenario, I focused on the noiselessness and that freaked me out even more.  That's because it amplifies smaller sounds like rodents skittering. 

Look, I know I sound like a crazy person with a bunch of neuroses.  Maybe I am, but that rodent thing is legit.  One time we had a rat loose in our apartment, and when we thought we had it quarantined, we all went to bed.  Guess whose room it ended it up in.  I woke up to the scratching sound of rat claws on the wood floor.  When I turned on the light, it ran across my wall.  I didn't know rats could do that!  And that is why I sleep with earplugs.

Beach Walk

I found a baby shark on the beach.
Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding.
Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.
The ocean had scraped his insides clean.
When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him,
like black water. Later, I saw a boy,
aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.
Like me, he was alone. Something tumbled between us—
not quite emotion. I could see the pink
interior flesh of his eyes. "I got lost. Where am I?"
he asked, like a debt owed to death.
I was pressing my face to its spear-hafts.
We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it.
The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.

-Henri Cole