I grew up in the suburbs. One of those where the city planners looked at a Valley like a band of butchers caught with some string and spare time netting the whole thing with roads, stroads, streets, concrete creeks and side streets. In retellings I often forget the 10 and 210 freeways with all 20 lanes because how else are we supposed to enjoy the great space of the West (promised to us so, our Manifest Destiny) if not to drive off into the sunset, California sober, and go nonverbal with friends in tow.

And the patches those roads don’t cover, for about $650K we can get a good plot of dirt out back (remember the drought) attached to a cute little 3 bed, 2 bath that looks like your neighbor’s. So, when you crane your neck East and West, North and South, and hell even across the 210 freeway as many times as you like firmly planted on your 2-car driveway, you’ll get a kick out of it. Not to mention your HOA sanctioned color palette: dark brown, brown, lighter brown, so light brown that it is functionally white, and reddish brown (but not adobe) for the shingles.

It was here when I learned that quiet was never, ever far away. Retreat into a car, stay put or ignite the engine, you can sit and make those tinny speakers work double-time. Or drive on up 20-minutes to that one wilderness park tucked into the mountains, but only before 10 AM in the summer and spring, unless melting in four-dimensions is your speed. Or even sit at home, HVAC-blasting, TV booming, with some crisp, cool quiet.

In New York, I learned that you bring an umbrella wherever you go because you never know, back pockets are for Kindles in a city where there is no service underground and you never want to be stuck underground with nothing to do is its own kind of purgatory. At daybreak, the shuffle of plastic tents and zippers, echoes of trains riding ungreased tracks with cracks, pops, and sparks; and the sonic multitudes of construction all stitched together by the whiz of the AC. Surrounded by decay, shrouded in anonymity in the sea of faces, of histories, I was defenseless and overwhelmed. I never knew a chorus of chaos till the city of metal towers.

Noise-cancelling is just one iteration to drown out the barrage, ignore the cries, retreat, and alienate deeper into the self.

Within 5 minutes of leaving the apartment I was subletting wedged in an area formerly known as Harlem, I came across a man defecating between two cars and another pounding on plexiglass at the corner bodega. At first these were exceptional, and I collected them as such. The next morning, on my first commute to my internship, there was a woman in a night gown who walked up and down the downtown bound carriage pleading “I am 6 months pregnant, and I am HIV-positive with no place to live and no money for food, please help me.”

The girl beside me noise-cancelled and across from me a man in a suit clutched his briefcase tighter, gaze unwavering on his copy of The Economist. I gave her the $2 bill my mom told me to keep safe.

I saw her again two months later smoking a cigarette outside the station. I walked past her. In those two months I had changed: I was called a slur the same day of Pride. I interned at an office that recently stopped prosecuting the elders’ gambling ring across the street to quell progressives. To top it all off, my boyfriend at the time unilaterally decided to open the relationship. To survive, I resigned myself to a life in a bubble that consisted only of myself and the sounds and sights that I wanted.

I failed miserably.

The week of the slur, I battled bronchitis in a room that resembled a brick coffin with a porthole, which I had later learned had once been a living room. My sickness a consequence of the “once in a lifetime” Canadian wildfire swallowing everything in deep browns, oranges, and at one point, black. Every breathe I took, woody and heavy, burned as if my two lungs were filled with tar that bubbled and swelled. A whole week.

At work, daily news briefs assembled a constellation of “exceptional” events: the scooter shooter in Midtown; deaths on Rikers Island blamed, by one conservative paper, on “inhumane conditions;” and a stray bullet lodging itself in the neck of a brand new grandmother. New York became synonymous with death.

I tried to escape. Museums. Sundays runs. Food markets. The normal things a 20-year-old intern in New York could do. I was at one point doing the normal things that a 20-something-year-old would do, but I chose the wrong venue and no longer was the 23-year-old from Maine. None of it worked. It was only months later, on a different continent, in a different city, amongst a different breed that I gave in.

It was a lunch rush in mid-November off Tottenham Court Road when I found myself bouncing between doctors and nurses chowing down Greggs, Pret cups slurped dry, university chums digging in their packs of “baccy,” and architecture associates migrating out of Fitzrovia for their daily walks. Amidst this blur of faces, paces, and laces I stumbled into a Curry’s, the Best-Buy across the pond.

I was lured there by a friend who uses her statement sleek, silver noise-cancelling headphones as an accessory. We were up late the previous night working on our magazine, and since I was trying to piece together my new partner and friend, images of her world-swallowing-big-blue eyes flickered in. There she was going crazy till 5 AM to “Don’t Go – Gerd Janson’s Rework” by Julie McDermott in some far-off basement, her silver piece giving the hula-hoops of our heyday a run for its money. In another, I was yelling her name as she cycled away off up towards the British Museum, cancelling out the sounds with that Italo-American Girl smile. And when I looked across that round table with the chip marks in the media center, there it was, wrapped around her neck.

“I never leave the house without it, London’s loud, London’s crazy,” she said without looking up from her screen, “I want to listen to my crazy.” I was sold. I wanted to listen to my crazy.

I ripped open that box while still inside, paired, noise-cancelled, and played “Into the Groovey” by Sonic Youth. I crumpled and Kobe’d the receipt on my way home. I texted my boyfriend “My life will never be the same!” The last time he received a message like that, it was to declare myself as diagnosed, a confusing stretch of memories and calls strung together by my new label, PTSD. His heart certainly skipped a beat.

Yet, that pep in my step, the smile on my god damn face, the swagger I let myself fall into, was life altering. Noise-cancelling felt like a deep breath, Redwood fresh, peppermint tea snuggled up in some far-off Dietzenbach, a sliver of home.

This is a story of me turning 20 and learning what it means to live in a city. Loud, loud, loud. A lot of faces, a lot of history. Quiet, a hot commodity. Car horns, bull horns, random yelling, chitter chatter, pitter patter, train screechin’, ballroom hollerin’, only God knows what else; always, sounds toddling along like sunlight in water.

I cancel noise, I purify air, and I filter water. The chorus continues and I learned to weep alone. A sick joke but at least now I get to listen to my crazy.