My ears will never experience silence, the city has numbed them. In quiet corners I hear streets filled with traffic and pedestrians, the reversing delivery trucks, caterwauls of distant alarms and machinery.

I hear the birds ducking for fish on a lake surrounded entirely by pines bowing slightly inward as the wind chases the leaves of the forest through the valleys, gently pushing wisps of sweat-matted hair from my forehead.

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