Working in a wood-molding warehouse, everything feels like the volume’s been turned down to zero. For ten hours a day, four days a week, I once spent the majority of my summer living as if life was on mute. At the sound of every first buzzer I’d jam those earplugs into my hearing holes and I’d be off to my own silent little world. As long as you kept quiet and did what you were told, nobody bothered you.
Every day, the saws sang like cicadas on the grand reopening of mating season, and after long enough, you didn’t even hear that. The only thing you had between yourself and the white noise ambience of molding machines was your conscious stream of thought.
I often got to wonder about the Lifers; how had they worked here for ten years?
If I worked here long enough, would I run out of things to think? How long, standing around in this hot tin box on the side of a road that served no better purpose than being the industrial version of the Island of Misfit Toys, how long could I bear the silence before breaking and succumbing to this miserable, droning state?
The Lifers; had they no souls?
Across the street from my building, a great forest of luxurious greens fell to the blades of unyielding productivity.
Machines making room for hot tin boxes.
Machines making room for new machines.
For the trees, hope was as empty as the blue sky they had always reached for. But come September I’d be back to attending university lectures and seminars: learning to think again.
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