Woke to a resounding KHALAS reverberating inside my head. The end-all, all-caps response to life right now. It has a doppler echo and continues to boomerang around the space between my ears. Enough with it! How does one scream in Arabic while typing on a computer? This is no looped-song-opera stuck on repeat forever. This is someone drop-kicking a drum set across the stage, or tearing hundreds of thousands of paper sheets in unison, or millions of street cleaners taking on the same neighborhood.

The problem with sounds in your head is that you can’t unplug the cable. The speakers can’t shatter, because they’re not ruled by the same physics as our body parts. So how to silence the noise inside this make-believe physics? I find myself back in that cinderblock high school, tracing my finger and watching the walls explode behind me. I am dancing with my whole heart in the middle of a concrete hangar that is filled with light. My shoes are off and I am running through silt that belched up from the drowning creek.