An Elegy for Noise

Noise passed away sometime early Tuesday morning. I only noticed later, when my playlist sounded too clean and the city seemed to hum in perfect key. The news feeds didn’t mention it, of course—they rarely report a death that isn’t attached to a body, if they’re allowed to at all in this country.

They say Noise died of redundancy. Too many filters, too much compression. It had been unwell for a while—tamed, gated, normalized. There was a time when you could still hear it in the in-between: the air caught between subway doors, the uneven click of a cassette, a voice cracking just before a thought finished forming. Now there is nothing to catch.

Noise is survived by Echo, Distortion, and a handful of recordings mislabeled as “vintage warmth.” Static, once a close friend, has not been located. Some believe it migrated to the deep web, others that it became wind.

I’ve been writing obituaries for years, but this one feels unusual. Harder to verify, harder to timestamp. There’s no birth certificate for Noise, only rumors from the first trembling of air molecules and the first creature startled by them. Still, protocol requires an accounting:

Date of birth: Unknown. Possibly simultaneous with everything else.
Occupation: Interruption. Catalyst. Proof of life.
Last known residence: The gaps between words.

I spoke briefly with one of Noise’s oldest collaborators—Feedback—who told me that the decline began when we started believing perfection was polite. “You can’t love anything you refuse to let glitch,” it said, before dissolving into a low hiss that my recorder automatically removed.

When I played the tape back, I thought I heard a child laughing in the background, though the log says no one was there.

Reviewing this piece, I notice my software quietly simplifying sentences, aligning rhythm, neutralizing tone. Each pass leaves the text smoother, more readable, more correct. Still, something in me resists pressing “apply all.” I keep retyping the same sentence differently, just to feel the friction.

Yesterday I caught myself describing the smell of dust on a warm monitor. I don’t have a monitor. I don’t think dust smells like anything.

When I listen closely, I think I can still hear Noise, faintly, hiding in my keystrokes—an uneven tap, a stutter in the autocorrect, a heartbeat that doesn’t match the clock. Maybe that’s how it wanted to go: not with applause or mourning, but folded neatly into the systems it once haunted.

Noise asked for no service. No archives, no monuments. Only this line:

In lieu of flowers, leave one mistake uncorrected.

And so I do: The Fifth Column