The Noise
part 1

A quiet and mundane breakroom. Tiled floors with standard wood-varnished cabinets. A simple place that lets anyone in to rest -- at least, employees only. And even then, it's simplicity alienates me. I can't rest here. I can only cease my labor. Distress and monotony. Just some quiet from the storm of a thousand steel presses operating at maximum speed.

Thick, tinted windows surround this room. There's a constant pattern of droplets from a brief shower ten minutes ago. The skies are dark and the clouds are furrowing their gray brows. Inside this trap-box for 13 more minutes before it's time to take orders and bow on command.

There is a wilted flower in a pot making one last dying stretch to get sunlight through the blackened glass. Nobody's noticed.

Perhaps seconds away from a deep, unconscious sleep, and a sound from the city reaches up and strikes the window of our humble breakroom. Someone's playing a trumpet down there on the streets. I lean closer, but you can't see straight down from the tenth floor. It was just a momentary burst, a few fluttery notes played to the voice of the wind.

What was that noise? Who did it come from -- who was it looking for? Why did it stop? For the first time in my company's history, the workers acted in unision, all slowly edging closer to the windows, regardless of what any other might notice, each seeking to identify and discover that source of such tempered inspiration. Where did that sound go? Did it stop?

Another three notes blow from the trumpet, each holding onto the sound and then gently releasing it. There is a genius at work outside these humble walls, and a few lucky souls in this breakroom were privilege to this concert. But this person must be so far away, and our windows far too think. There's another pause. Did they stop? Did our hero forget about us?... Several more tunes are eked out with the brass instrument, only after the world's musician had a few, necessary moments of meditation and inner reflection. And, as these notes continue to grow and bind their melody and rhythm together, my soul is floating.

I gave my heart to that trumpeter. But before I can jump through the window to become one with the original inspiration of all of man's good and loving acts, the breakroom soundsystem belches out this high-pitched, ear-shattering ring. Break's over. And then we returned to our place of laboring -- a world of repetitive, rote, and unmelodic noises.

Part 2

Why couldn't they break the glass? Why couldn't those ear-catching bass-hits and those rhythmic tones reach up, ball their fists, and shatter the windows of that humble breakroom? We were entranced. If only we were smart enough to realize it was commanding us to crack the glass, to throw ourselves against those confining restrictions. For those few moments of our existence, we were one with the farthest reaches of the experience of the individual -- the greatest expression of the will to hold true communion with all conscious beings. One or two sharp pings from the announcement system, and our hearts release the blood, allowing us to pick up our feet and carry ourselves to our manned positions.

Just one hour and forty five minutes before it's time to be released from our holding cells. One hour and forty four minutes. Yeah, no problem. My mind shuts down, my body ceases to carry stimuli to my soul, and the surrounding world has left me completely disinterested in life. There are no trombonists or trumpeters around to lift me off my calloused feet, to bring light and vitality to the unexercised regions of the brain, to loan me their ideas on the social experience, and maybe, to let me know that society is big enough to make them feel completely alone. Nobody who's imitating the lifelessness of high-intensity machinery will stop to tell me that these concrete posts, these metal sidings, these inanimate ceilings and unenthusiastic floors make them feel trapped by their own experiences, by their resentments, by the way they've built themselves to react and to feel -- the little human mechanisms we develop, foster, and eventually rely upon for all of our interactions. Nobody here will let me know how intimidating a top-down social organization makes them feel. Nobody here lets me know how alone this society can make them feel. And then I, like the others, become truly alone, surrounded only by my multiple personalities and their pathetic attempts to compartmentalize the different aspects of my life. Oh, Icarus, I feel like your father... and I'll never be able to let go of this feeling.