I Started Listening to the Walls Differently
Before any of this, walls were a kind of punctuation. They ended a room; they held pictures; they kept the neighbor’s television at a polite distance. I did not think of them as channels. Then, slowly, they became exactly that—places sound could travel through, or get caught in, or pretend to come from when the real source was less visible. Infestation worry does not always arrive with a photograph. Sometimes it arrives as a hypothesis about hollow spaces, about what might move inside them when you are not looking.
I stopped playing music as often. That was not a decision I announced. It was a preference that crept in, the way a room gets colder when the sun shifts and you only realize you have closed the window after your hands have already done it. Silence felt risky and necessary at the same time: risky because it left space for small sounds to mean something; necessary because I could no longer pretend I was not listening for them.
The mind, I learned, is an impatient narrator. It fills gaps. A tick in the heating becomes a footfall; a plastic settling in the kitchen becomes a scratch. I tried to correct myself, to name the ordinary causes, and sometimes I succeeded. Other times correction felt like lying. The uncertainty was not comfortable, but it was familiar enough to live inside, the way you live inside a house that creaks at night and never tells you which beam is responsible.
I walked closer to certain walls as if proximity could settle the question. It did not. Proximity only refined the texture of my attention. I noticed the faint unevenness of paint, the places where dust gathered in a line, the outlet that sat slightly askew—not because any of those details proved anything, but because looking had changed its purpose. I was no longer admiring a room. I was scanning it the way you scan a face for a mood you are afraid might be there.
There were moments of shame in that scanning, moments when I felt I had reduced my home to a set of surfaces that might betray me. I had not meant to become someone who pressed an ear to plaster like a character in a story I would have rolled my eyes at. And yet the body does what the mind insists on, and the mind was insisting on information the eyes could not supply.
I wonder now how much of what I heard was real in a way that could be shared, and how much was real only inside the loop of worry. I do not think the distinction is as clean as either side would like. Fear and fact can overlap without matching perfectly, like two transparencies laid on top of each other: you still see both, even when the lines do not align.
Eventually I stepped back from the walls—not because I stopped caring, but because caring had exhausted a certain kind of attention. The listening changed again. It became less investigative and more habitual, a reflex I did not always notice until I noticed I was doing it. That may be the strangest residue: not the sound itself, but the proof that my body had learned a new way to be at home.
The walls are still walls. They still end the room. I still do not fully trust what I hear when the building goes quiet, and I am not sure I owe that distrust to the pests, to the building, or to the version of myself who learned to listen as if the house could answer.