Sweet Potato Haircut

The girl in the room next to me likes to scream and have her loud friends over to scream with her and it seems that there are only so many times that I can muster the energy and confidence to knock on her door, vibrating with sound, to confront her, the door swinging open to a wall of body heat and smell and mean looking faces. So I head out in the dark of night to the nearest store that might sell headphones, and the electronics department is vacant but for a teen employee sweeping the floor with his big dry mop, and I approach him and speak, my voice a warble in his ear-budded ears, he takes them out and looks at me expectantly, I ask if there is someone to help me buy some headphones. He walks off and I hope something will happen. I peruse the locked up electronics until a surprisingly kind man approaches and asks me what I’m looking for, and I say that

I’m looking for silence, for an elusive solitude that might restore my fraying edges, I am looking for distance and depth and significance. I say that I hope to have true quiet so that I might better appreciate sound, that I hope to have a darkness deep enough as to relish in the light. I say I’m looking for something resembling a remedy to the tarnishing of the human world before my eyes, the Great Unravelling that disillusions me with each shallow shriek and every prayed upon sports ball and all the careless litter, oh all the massive heaps of apathetic litter. I tell him I seek the stream of goodness into the world, I search for assembled chords and lettered words that might carry us through together, even the shrieking girl and her loud friends, even the litterers and the sports ball players. I am looking for a way that we might figure this out together, to share in the goodness of things, to respect each other’s aliveness and well-being. I suppose I am really searching for the love of the universe.

He says he has just the pair, and unlocks the case with a tiny key.