Noise Cancelling

On a day off, I took a walk along the river.

After a while, I sat down on a bench.

While resting, I put on some music through my earphones.

I opened my bottle and took a sip.

Across the river, the trees moved a little in the wind.

I must have been thinking about something.

After a while, I noticed that the music was playing from much farther away than usual.

It had not disappeared.

Instead, I could hear the shallow part of the river moving over the stones.

Whenever the wind blew, the leaves across the river made a fine, dry sound.

Thinking something might be wrong with the earphones, I opened my phone.

Noise cancelling was on.

That seemed backward.

I tried turning it off.

The music sounded normal.

I could still hear the river and the leaves, but they were outside the earphones.

I turned noise cancelling on again.

The music moved farther away.

The road noise thinned too.

The river remained.

The leaves remained.

For the moment, that was more comfortable.

I stopped the music.

Then I took the earphones out.

The distant sound of cars came back.

Someone’s voice mixed with the wind.

Even so, the sound of the river was coming from the river again.

The leaves were still across the water, where they belonged.

I sat there for a while without doing anything else.