Text and photos by Nester Nuñez (La Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – You’ve arrived at the beach of your dreams. You know you need to throw yourself in. You know that these waters and this time under will heal you. You look at the clear blue sky. The sun is still soft in the morning. The boat rests on a serene and transparent sea. A bird song in the distance calms you down. You take a deep breath. You let yourself fall into the depths.
Years ago, I had a poet friend who always wore big headphones. He used to go to work or his girlfriend’s house like this. You’d see him walking down any street in the city, on a bus, or sitting on the river esplanade or on a park bench like this. When I’d see the poet with his headphones on, I’d make a sign to greet him, but I wouldn’t bother him. I’d leave him alone with his music, with his audiobooks or whatever it was he was listening to. Until one day, curiosity got the better of me:
“What do you listen to so much?” I asked him. He didn’t hear me at first, of course. “What, what are you listening to?”
My friend took off the headphones and put them on me without smiling, without saying a word, without changing his calm expression. I didn’t hear anything. No music, no audiobook. I told him to play it. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the other end of the cable, all chewed up. I think he explained what had happened to me, but I couldn’t hear him. The headphones fit snugly. They isolated noise in a scary way.
A man who lives in the city from time to time without noise. A man who sees everything in black and white, at times. A man, a woman, who consciously buffers their sense of hearing, pays more attention to smells, to what they can see, to touch. A person like this isn’t afraid to access the ideas and emotions their mind conjures up. It’s a human being that is experiencing a different way to be free. Every now and again, I go b
