It is almost silent. There is the air outside, that vague sound, but it is low, quieter than the buzz in my ears. My fingers tap and stop. I adjust myself, scrape my shoe along the floor. I think. The city could be dead. It is empty in my head. The sirens are broken, the streets deserted. There is nothing out there. I am alone. The apocalypse has been. The noise of everything else is only in my head.I am in a forest, and now a desert, and now in space, where I have always been, destined for another place, waiting to get there, so that I might find a place to be quiet again and write about that, alone in the silence, the air, the world reduced to the buzzing in my ears.