I didn't realize I'd never heard true silence until I was two blinks and single sigh from death. The room had been so loud and suddenly the sounds started to mute ungracefully, like a chorus in chaos but the singers were being shot in the head, one by one.
When they were sure I would live and sent me on my way again, I was suddenly aware of the constant beeping and humming and grinding and thudding and crashing and screeching and roaring pressing against everything. The air has no space, no room to breathe, so it rushed into my echoing head and within two minutes it was so hard to remember what I heard just moments before - the world about to die, with nothing left in it.
Someone whose face I cannot recall once gave me a flower, a thing I'd never seen before. He didn't even say why - they didn't tell me why I was dying, either. But I missed that pretty little thing every day, after it faded and crumbled to a fine brown mess that I scattered in the dust and dirt and wind outside. Hard as I concentrated on all the flickering visions fighting the darkness of a usually empty imagination, I couldn't picture in my mind the exact pattern of the folded petals and the exact shade of yellow. But something told me it was something worth missing, so I did. Now I find myself missing the silence with that same sad and barely existing memory of it.