My Brain Would Appreciate the Lack of YOU

Dear smoke alarm,

SHUT UP!

It is not necessary for you to reassert your presence in my house by periodically letting out an earsplitting "beep" that, quite literally, splits my eardrums in to fragments and leaves them to lie, throbbing, in my head where they eventually get forced down my ear canal by your incessant bleepbleepbeeping. If you didn't guess before, let me tell you that this is immenselyimmensely painful in every way, and I do not enjoy it AT. ALL.

But not even that is the end of your treachery, is it? Once my shattered eardrum is sufficiently burrowed inside my skull, sounds waves from your stupidity slowly move it deeper and deeper until the razor-sharp fragments impale my brain, or - more specifically - my temporal lobe. This is also immenselyimmensely painful, and leaves a residue of anger and fear and sadness along with migraines and potential ear and brain damage in its wake. I hate headaches. I hate brain damage. I hate feeling sad. Why do you inflict these things upon me when I am least expecting it? Why can’t you give a little warning before you decide to deafen me for the rest of my life; surely I deserve that, at least?! I mean, I haven’t KILLED you yet, have I? (Though, as your destructive behavior continues, that option becomes more and more agreeable to my murderous side.)

Another thing, smoke alarm, you terrify me. I mean, we are trained from birth to be wary of your beeps. “Remember, children, when the little red box starts screeching and screaming and beeping incessantly, that means something’s wrong.”

Whenever your beeps grow more numerous and closer together and louder in decibels, I begin to wonder: is the roof on fire? Is someone trying to kill me by flooding my ventilation shafts and air-conditioning vents with noxious fumes that, once anyone else leaves the room, will seep from the floor in a cloud of creepy purple mist and slowly sneak its way inside my system until all trace of oxygen has been snatched from my body and I will fall to the ground, gasping like a fish out of water, flopping and gulping and making fish faces as my brain slowly switches from involuntary functions to Brain? What brain? Then, ten days later, someone will find my body and I will have partially decomposed or rotted away, and rats will have eaten my bulging purple eyeballs, and rigor mortis will have turned me into a strange horror creature with half-chewed-off arms and legs bent at funny angles. After that, no one will come to my funeral because they won’t want to smell little ol’ dead me, and then I will silently cry as they bury me because no one will have heard my last words: “It was the smoke alarm’s fault….it LIED!!!”

Yes, these are the sort of things you lead little paranoid me to believe in, and then I am afraid to sleep and afraid to be alone and afraid to enter the house, so that I either stay up all night with a gun under my pillow (I don’t know where I obtain this imaginary gun or why I think it will be effective against poisonous gas, but it’s a hallucination, so go with it), waiting, or sit outside in the freezing rain, peering in the window like a sad, dripping puppy dog with a mass of matted, muddy hair, finally caving and coming inside, only to have the noxious fumes nightmare and become terrified all over again.

What all of this boils down to, smoke alarm, is: WHY DO YOU HAVE TO MAKE THAT NOISE?!?! I know it’s your purpose in life to alert people to things, but there really isn’t anything to alert me to now, is there? I would understand if I’d left the stove on or carbon monoxide were leaking through the vents or my head was on fire, but there’s nothing like that going on. Instead, every ten minutes I have to get up and press the little green button that makes you shriek in my ear for 10 seconds, all so that, for 9 minutes and 50 seconds, you will remain quiet as you build up the energy needed to beep again on your own free will.

Either that, or I scream at you, call you names that even a personified version of you - an inanimate object - couldn’t understand, and pound you with my fist until either you give in or I do [usually me, since pain is a powerful incentive to stop punching a hard object.]

Honestly, smoke alarm, I understand your need for attention. Sometimes even I feel the need to scream into my pillow or yell at someone “look at me! I exist!” but trust me, smoke alarm, I know you exist. Once again, I am alerted to your presence, and have reclaimed the knowledge that yes, you are glued to my living room wall, and yes, you work, and yes, I will wake up if you ever go off in an emergency. Just, please, stop. One beep is enough, trust me.

I hope you can come to understand my side of the argument, and that, perhaps over brunch, we can discuss and accept our differences [I, Jane, you, smoke alarm] and eventually reach a compromise of some sort. Maybe you can promise to be quiet from now on, as long as I promise, in return, to give you a pat now and again and slip you some broccoli under the table (even though you’re five feet up and attached to the wall, and, oh yeah, a mechanical object without any taste buds or stomach or teeth or any necessity for human-sustenance.)
Thank you for taking the time to listen.

Sincerely,

--the girl sitting on the couch, her ears bleeding