Ambient Noise

I am standing in a room filled with eighty people.

The floor is concrete and the ceiling is high,

which means the sound of every voice

is bouncing off the hard surfaces

and returning to my ears as a single,

undifferentiated mass of noise.

*

You are standing twelve inches from my face.

Your mouth is moving.

I can see your teeth and the way

your tongue hits the roof of your mouth,

but the air between us is too crowded with other sounds.

I hear the first word of your sentence.

I hear the second word.

The third word is buried by a laugh

from the group of men standing behind you.

The fourth word is lost to the clatter

of a glass hitting a table.

*

I am missing thirty percent of what you are saying.

*

Because I want you to think I am attentive,

I have tightened the muscles in my face.

My lips are pulled back into a smile.

that does not reach my eyes.

It is a static, frozen expression

designed to signal agreement

without requiring comprehension.

*

My neck is beginning to ache.

I am leaning my left ear toward your lips,

tilting my head at an unnatural angle

to shorten the distance the sound must travel.

The tendons in my throat are tense.

My shoulders have risen toward my ears.

*

I am nodding my head at regular intervals.

I do this every four seconds

to keep the rhythm of the conversation

from collapsing entirely.

Inside my mind, I am trying to fill

the gaps in your speech with logic.

I am guessing at the nouns.

I am inventing the verbs you might have used.

*

We are participating in a failure.

You think you are being heard.

I am pretending to hear you.

The concern is that we are two people

occupying the same small space

while the information you are offering

is disappearing into the room

before it can reach my brain.

*

My neck is tired.

My jaw is sore from smiling.

I still do not know what you said.