I resigned myself to being an observer of the living: one who observed half the time and floated away the other half. I wanted to reach out to strangers and ask them to pull me to shore: I wondered if any of them were drifting through life like me. I knew about sound and wondered how to pull it from the parts of me where it had been dormant. I knew that there were screams inside of me that became muffled whispers because I refused to hear them.