Hi. I've thought about calling for a while now. I wasn't sure anyone would believe me, but I think your listeners might understand. This started last October. My husband was out of town for work that whole week, some conference in Phoenix, and I was home alone with nothing but the house and my own thoughts. I'd been dealing with insomnia for months at that point. Just couldn't shut my brain off at night. That week, with the house empty, I started noticing something. The quiet. I mean really noticing it. I'd lock the bedroom door at night, unplug the phone, anything to cut out distractions. When you're alone long enough, you start to hear things you normally tune out. The refrigerator hum. The settling of the walls. Your own heartbeat. But underneath all of that, there was something else. Something I'd never heard before.
It was maybe the third night alone. Around 3 AM, couldn't sleep again. I was lying in bed in the dark, and I started doing this thing where I'd try to find the quietest moment. Like a game. Waiting for the fridge to cycle off, waiting for the house to stop creaking, just trying to find pure silence. And I found it. For maybe two seconds, everything stopped. No sound at all. Complete nothing. And in that nothing, I heard it. This... I don't know how to describe it. A scream. Not a human scream. More like the sound of everything screaming all at once. This massive, overwhelming noise, like the universe itself was shrieking. It hit me so hard I actually gasped. And then it was gone. The fridge kicked back on, and everything was normal again. I told myself I imagined it. Lack of sleep, being alone too long. But I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Over the next few weeks, I started doing research. I know that sounds strange, but I needed to understand what I'd heard. I went to the library, looked up anything I could find about sound, about space, about what silence actually is. And here's what I learned. Space isn't silent. We think it is because that's what we're taught, but it's not. There's radiation everywhere. Cosmic background noise. The sun is constantly exploding. Stars are screaming as they die. Black holes are grinding matter into nothing. The universe, if that makes sense, is incredibly, impossibly loud. We just can't hear it because we're protected. That's when I started to understand. Silence isn't natural. It's not the absence of sound. It's the presence of something else. Something blocking the noise out.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]