The intensity of the noise took her by surprise. How could something so fine as water make so much noise? The noise it made from a shower head was soothing, but this was something else. It entered her from the belly and threatened to consume her. It wasn’t the first time sound shook every cell skin, muscle and tissue cell. When she was ten her father took her to the local race track of the small town they had just moved to, much to the chagrin of her mother. Excitement tingled up and down her legs, making it difficult to keep up with her dad’s pace and they maneuvered through main steet’s sidewalks. There was a buzz in the air and a strange zinging noise she had never heard before. At first she thought it came from the power plant since it sounded to her like electricity shooting through the air, but the closer they got to the race track, the louder the noise. Having experienced only normal day-to-day traffic and sometimes the rumble of a tractor at her grandfather’s farm, Delia was ill-prepared for the screeching and shrieking, the whining and squealing when they made it through the ticket counter and into the crowd. Each time the cars took a corner she was reminded of the pigs her grandfather slaughtered each fall. Her father was not as surprised or ill-prepared as she was, thankfully. Just as she thought the contents of dinner would rumbled up from her belly and onto the black-stained concrete in front of her, her father lowered a heavy pair of black headphones over her head and the sound came to a bearable minimum. Though the black pads were too big and it took more effort to keep her head up, Delia was grateful for them blocking the image of a pig being slaughtered in her mind. Her dad took her hand and helped her up onto a railing where she could see the squealing cars fly by. Smiling crinkled the skin near her ears from the weight of the headphones, but that didn’t stop her. At the end of the night she shouted with the rest of the crowd as the blue car took first place and her dad treated her to a snow cone. Now, three decades later, she stood before a different all-encompassing noise and felt the sting of missing her father on top of all the other pain.
The water that plummeted down the side of the cliff and crashed down at her level pounded in her ears. Just like at the race track, her cells vibrated and danced, but this time they did not threaten to bring up her protein bars. Instead, they seemed to beckon to the crashing, welcoming the noise, opening wider so the place in her brain filled with to overflowing could receive more of it. The place that up until then could only seem to focus on her loss, anger, frustration and hopelessness was now getting a noise cleansing, shaking the thoughts that had stuck there for weeks now loose and sending them into the atmosphere.
Salt saturated water sprayed up from where the water hit the rocks with such force Delia imagined it crushing anything that dared to get between the water and rock. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to place herself there and find herself taken away by this beautiful force of nature, but she opened her mouth and blew the thought away as Dr. Connie had tried to teach her to do. Together, with the noise of the water and the salt in the air, Delia finally understood what the Doctor meant. It wouldn’t help to think like that.
The noise, which demanded to be understood, demanded take full attention from its spectators. The noise that took over every thought and worry and smashed them to bits at the rocks. The first glimmer of hope in months appeared out of the cloud of splashing water in front of her. The noise wrapped around her, enveloping her in the hug she had tried so often to give herself. Because nothing could be thought of while the noise of the water pierced her very being. And for the first time in weeks her own salt water mixed with that of the waterfalls, binding them together in a ferocious moment of crashes and cries, one noise covering another, one water healing another.