Disappointments

There is a distinct sound that a person’s chest makes when they are suddenly and irrevocably disappointed; a grainy rustle as of old leaves pressed slowly down under a flat, gray stone. It’s virtually impossible to hear unless you are connected in some way to the chest cavity; in everyday conversation, it can go quite unnoticed.

It’s not for its rarity that it goes unmarked – in fact, it’s a sound heard daily throughout the civilized world. There are other sounds equally common, and equally unheard of, except by the very observant, or the very solemn, who are often one and the same.

There is the short, dry inhalation that a woman makes once she realizes that the familiar face she thought was smiling at her is really looking just past her left shoulder. There is the wrinkled, compressed throat-clearing of a man waiting patiently at 11:00pm for a teller in the 15-items or less line at the grocery store, cradling his one bottle of 7-Up and a Swanson’s chicken TV dinner. The brownish groan of twilled fabric as a childless woman buries hands back in her pockets after giving back to her mother her infant niece. The click of the vertebrae of a man bent down again. The soft whistle of a stifled sigh. Even the eyes of the very disillusioned can be heard to murmur damply across their almost tears.

A famous writer once said that we lead lives of quiet desperation, and that is true.

But for those who observe, the quiet is deafening.