It was on a Wednesday. I woke up on my right side, grabbed my phone from the bedside table to turn off that obnoxious alarm I always immediately forget to change, and sat up to a world of imbalance. My sight was level, but my hearing was somehow slanted. After blinking away the sleep some more and powering through one of my hearty yawns, I identified the change at last and groaned to inform the uncaring world of my disapproval. 

There was a ringing in my right ear, loud as the sort you'd get after a music concert if you stand right at the front with no protection; I always said that earplugs were for pussies. Tinnitus is the proper term, I'd looked it up on my phone while waiting for the kettle to boil. I was—as is typical for me in the inaugural hour of any given day—a dishevelled mess, barely standing in the corner of my kitchen with half-lidded eyes and the yearning for coffee keeping me tethered to this waking world. Caffeine was my god back then, I'd not yet learnt the true heights of divinity. As I stood, waiting, I let the morning world I loathed serenade me with the stereo sound of hissing kettle to my left, and the high pitched ringing of the blasted tinnitus to my right. It was like a whistle had been lodged into my ear, and the air flow blew it indefinitely to torture me for the crime of consciousness. I racked my brain to try and recall if I'd been exposed to any loud noises in the day prior, or if I'd had any physical trauma recently in that vicinity. To my knowledge, there was no clear answer, and so I began to look up other causes while the kettle clicked and demanded my attention. 

Coffee is a beautiful thing; little brown beans and steaming hot water sunk its claws into me so deeply I'd have called myself a slave before I came to learn better. To be beholden, truly at the whim of your beckoning master, is a wholly different affair; the removal of all responsibility and doubt in where you stand, sit or kneel is on a level that my instant black coffee simply couldn't fathom. 

I sat, and I drank—holding the steaming mug with one hand while the other scrolled my phone for medical insight on my new annoyance. A blockage of wax, perhaps... gross. A serious illness, maybe... let's fucking hope not. My research continued until I did as I always knew I would: get overwhelmed with all the possibilities and resolve to simply wait and see. Most of the time these sort of bodily frustrations had a way of sorting themselves out in a day or two and disappearing without any explanation of where they'd come from. I wasn't entirely sure if that was how everybody else lived their lives, content with a nigh weaponized lethargy in tandem with decisive ignorance, but it had gotten me through the first 24 years well enough. All being well, the ringing would clear itself up by midday.

I was almost sure of it. 

Days passed, sneering at me with some modicum of malice as they went on by and left their doors closed to that rude passenger in my ear. The ring, the tinnitus, had begun to overstay its welcome. My nights had grown restless as I wrestled with a chronic sound that never permitted me a single moment of silence throughout the long and arduous week; not even for just a second was I allowed a break from it. Despite my general distrust of medical professionals after the personal hell that was my transition—an exercise in futility and persecution that predictably ended in finding Thai hook-ups that didn't ask so many roundabout fucking questions—I'd decided to go and pay a visit to my general practitioner. The man was an irritable fuck, and in my present state I wasn't much better. As such, the appointment was a swift and sordid little tryst between my fantasised fist against his fantasied skull. The daydreaming was all that I could do to mitigate the discomfort, as the reality was much the opposite of my violent little fantasy; a hard stick of plastic pushing down into my ear hard enough for me to hear a crack and wince at the awful burst of pain it gave me. That he had the gall to tell me "Everything seems fine, should clear up in a few days," with such vexing nonchalance after putting me through what my indignant mind could only register as assault, made me want to vomit; I'd do it in his direction, creating a Pollock-worthy picture of bile on canvas white coat. 

A few days passed, and I wished so badly to believe in karma just to comfort myself with the assurance my lousy GP would get some comeuppance. The pain in my ear finally eased, but the ringing held strong. It was a persistent hum, and I'd begun to lose sleep as it mocked me on my side at night. More furious research had informed me that  those with chronic Tinnitus conditions eventually learned to tune it out and could even go full days without becoming consciously aware of the ceaseless rackets in their skulls. What a comfort it was, to know how far my goalposts had been pushed already as I celebrated the mere fantasy of a full day without registering that terrible noise. I lived in a world without silence, and only after losing such still quiet did I begin to realise how little I valued it. I craved the nothing like nothing else, attempting to recall the last intact memory I had of silence and coming up short. Gods, did I crave the peace, sitting alone in my silent apartment and being barred from the simple pleasure that should have brought. Usually my roommate Jessica would have been fussing around at this hour, playing music as she danced in her underwear with papers scattered across the ground for revision. The oddball in my life had been on vacation with her parents since before my waking into that peaceless world, and I'd never felt myself craving her company more than I did in those unenlightened, tragic days. 

My eccentric roommate was double-majoring in biochemistry and human psychology, so she was often too busy for chit-chat while she was home—still, just like silence, I had not realised how much I valued her presence until it was carved out of my life for a significant stretch of time. Perhaps not her specifically, but human company was certainly lacking in my current situation, leaving me to spiral into madness by my lonesome. I did think about Jessica more often than usual, though—more often than I tended to while she was under the same roof, even—because she'd infiltrated my dreams. 

Is it creepy to dream of your presumably straight roommate in such intimate settings? If it was, then I was a reluctant pervert, as much at the mercy of my dreams as I was that constant fucking ringing. A part of me was surprised I caught enough hours to enter REM sleep and dream at all, notable bags had developed under my eyes and reduced what little charm my face already held—or maybe not; some dykes dig the tired and constantly pissed off aesthetic, or so I hear. 

While definitively intimate, my dreams of Jessica were not of an enjoyable, sexual nature, I was dismayed to find. They came in two varieties; the first featured me laying in that obnoxiously large recliner she barely fit into her room, sinking down into the light brown leather as Jessica's lips moved in dead silence—and I mean silence. The second dream was much less relaxing, and I'd have been inclined to label it a nightmare had I the personal vulnerability at the time to admit when something rattled me so. In the dream, I was laying in my own bed, but there was somebody crawling over me pinning me to the mattress: Jessica. In my nightmare roommate's hand was a dropper of some variety, like you'd see at a pharmacy, and her cold hand—clad in some manner of thin plastic—pushed my head onto its side as it held my face firm. I felt so sluggish, like I'd been drugged, so fighting Jessica off seemed far beyond my dream-self's abilities. Then it happened: something wet dripped into my ear and began to fizz inside my skull, the popping sounds accompanied by an itchy heat that had me gasping into her clamping hand. 

Then I woke up. 

They were just dreams of course, but a part of me had to admit to some degree of nervousness in coming face to face with Jessica again after the strange images, and sensations, began to sprout inside my sleeping mind. Fortunately, I still had a week to wait for her to return, and planned to do what I could to alleviate my symptoms until that date; melatonin for sleep and olive oil for my naughty ear. I would get through this, one week left alone in the student apartment to put my big girl pants on and get my shit together. It was just a little ringing and I'd let the place turn to shit, it was time to vacuum the floors and clean up all my empty bowls and brush my hair and—

Make it stop, god, please. 

This was my most common thought throughout the hellish week that followed—as though my collection of thoughts was a limited array stored on a rolodex in my head that always flipped back to this one. Make it stop, god, please. I wasn't managing to tune it out at all, in fact it only ever seemed to grow louder. The ringing had begun to rule me so concretely by this point that I wore pathetic little scratch marks around my right ear and the surrounding skin that I'd resolved to blame on a cat I didn't own. The ringing had begun to conquer me so thoroughly, at this juncture, that I'd developed a nervous disposition that took no prisoners—from the wallpaper I tore through habitually to the delivery drivers I'd crave the small talk from only to snap at them the moment it got too much. I was falling apart from so simple a thing, a ceaseless high pitched hum that never let me be still. I was jittery, and clumsy, and irritable as my shithead doctor who I couldn't bear to return to even by this point of desperation. 

I wondered, childishly, whether Jessica would be able to help me given her fields of study. Of course, I dismissed what I saw as nothing but a silly thought at the time rather quickly, but how little did I understand my own wisdom in that moment. Only one day remained before the world would forever change for me a second time, but before that treasured meeting could come I still had my date with rock bottom.

A glass of whisky, smashed against the corner of the kitchen table, and a trickle of thick candy red that warmed my paling cheek. Dark circles encased my poor eyes like jailors and I yearned for silence more than I cared for my own safety. I knew that the incessant, evil sound that had begun to ruin me was hiding like a villain somewhere deep in my inner ear, and wondered if I couldn't simply take a stab at it. I knew I'd permanently deafen myself—in the best case scenario—if I decided to go ahead and indulge the drunken urge, but deafness seemed like salvation when pitted against the high hum of hell I'd been tormented by. I'd been drinking long into the early hours, and light spilled onto my fingers with enough warmth to stay my hand. I cried, throwing the bottle in a tearful tantrum that had me missing the sound of the door latch. I only heard the door on its closing, my shoulders picking up and eyes widening at the horrible state of the kitchen. Oh god, I'd stayed up so late... so early... that I was hearing Jessica's return to the dorm!

Except, I did not hear her voice. No, but there was something. A strange experience that had quelled my sudden panic in an instant and left me with a feeling in my chest I could not put to words. There was a short burst of silence, genuine silence, barely long enough for someone to speak the words "Hey, I'm back!" 

I blinked, slowly. Then again. For just a second and a half, I had heard nothing. Sound returned; I listened to the turning of the kitchen doorhandle and peered up in shame at the woman I'd expected to chew me out for wrecking the shared space of. Instead, I saw benevolence in the shape of a woman—a smile that held within it the serenity of silence, and eyes that knew exactly what they fixed upon. Jessica opened her mouth and spoke, but all I heard was the absence. It was heaven, and I knew not how she did it... but all I cared about was that I'd finally found my fix. Jessica's very words were saviours, and her gift of silence made me cry again albeit with much happier tears. 

We cleaned the kitchen together, in silence, as I suspected that she was singing to the music she'd put on for the shared activity. I only heard the beginning and end of the song, because for the rest of its duration I'd been saved by that black hole of speech her vocal chords appeared to produce for me. My silent goddess, Jessica, was beginning to stitch this fraying mess of me back together. Menial work had never felt so special. 

After the laminate floor had been swept clean of broken glass, and my bloodied lobe patched up with an adorable love-heart patterned plaster, Jessica sat down at the kitchen table and spoke in beautiful silence once more. I felt myself buckle under an invisible weight and dropped suddenly onto my knees. It hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to the chronic terror of my tinnitus. If it were not for Jessica's generosity in continuing to talk to me, fingers stroking through my mess of blonde locks that really needed untangling with a brush, I might have begun to question why I was kneeling so docilely on our kitchen floor. I simply did not care why when I was being saved. There was a prolonged silence in the room as I felt myself grow even less aware, more relaxed. A distant part of me knew that a long silence meant that Jessica was speaking a lot of words into my open ears, but again, I could not bring myself to care—nor could I question my Goddess. 

Goddess? That was what I began to see her as, a deified being who wielded such magical quiet with grace and kindness so long as I offered something just as valuable and special in return. Even though I could not consciously hear the word, I felt it in my core, growing like a newborn: Servitude. 

My desire to serve Jessica was purely functional at first, but my gratitude towards the silent Goddess slowly developed over the proceeding week into something ugly in its need; I was dripping with the desire to pay her back for this gift, stepping into her room at the woman's summons and finding her seated in that brown leather chair—no longer reclined—awaiting my servitude. 

The first thought I had when I found myself dropping back onto my knees so suddenly, was that the rug in her room was much nicer on them than the hard flooring in the kitchen. It was something else to feel grateful for in my warped perspective of the world, and I found myself smiling into the hand that cupped my cheek without warning. Jessica was speaking silence, and I sunk against the invisible words like an obedient pet. It was so perfect that I barely even stirred from my near-catatonic stupor when the woman slid out of her slip-ons and flexed her naked toes in the fake-firelight of her room-turned-office. There was something about Jessica's feet that demanded my focus, desires no doubt wrought by words I was not permitted to hear. I preferred to hear nothing, and so I had no leg to stand on if I tried to protest the strange urges planted in my ailing mind. I was Jessica's servile subject, seduced by silence so sweet that I'd sublimate my own outdated preferences to better suit her needs. If her feet needed soothing, then my tongue was to be her personal masseuse. 

Wearing nothing but a long white coat and black lace bralette, Jessica raised her perfect leg and lowered the sole of her foot onto my overheating face. Her lips yet moved, saving me from madness, as I tasted the warm and salty skin with the fervour of a true devotee and the academic curiosity of a scholar; I had to learn how best to please my Goddess lest she abandon me to a world of endless humming. Her foot tasted so fucking good. I don't think that I loved the taste of feet, but this was her foot, her sweat clinging to my tongue and greeting tastebuds with a delectable pungency that rotted rational thought. Higher brain function died against the flavour of my Goddess's well-travelled sole and the silence of her script. I worked my tongue into those wrinkles and giggled as she made them disappear with a simple flex, holding her ankle so reverently as I became more intimate with the lowest part of Jessica's divine form. 

Another invisible command invited me, persuasively—forcefully, in fact—to take her toes into my mouth. The thought that would have disgusted me only a day ago now made me shiver in anticipatory pleasure, excitement brewing between my own hot thighs as I knelt closer and arched my back nicely enough for her to rest her free foot across it. Gods did I feel useful, a two-in-one product: both a fervent toe-sucking machine and a half-decent footstool at the same time!

I think I spoilt myself by taking the big toe past my lips first, resting it on my tongue and associating the deep silence with pleasure towards the act. It wasn't long before I was sucking on the thing like a lolly, moaning whorishly into my laughing roommate's foot while being wholly unaware of the sounds either of us were making; both strumming of chords should have humiliated me, were I cognizant enough to care, but I was simply too focused on my task. I was good at it too, I think, because Goddess let me start on the second foot after I'd sufficiently lathered up the first in servile spit reserved just for her. 

Her fingers spread through my hair and tightened, pulling me deep into her orbit once I was finished filling my broken little head with the overpowering taste of women's feet. My face pressed against her thigh and I was intoxicated by the sticky sheen of precum that smeared against my nose and lips. Her cock was dancing, and when I took it into my mouth the silence died.

Instead of nothing, I began to hear a beautiful song. It was a swan song for my sense of self, and my bobbing head was to be the percussion. I let her fuck my throat until the lingering confusion and resistance died, then I swallowed ropes and ropes of calm acceptance. 

I finally heard Jessica's laugh; it was shrill and cruel and oh so beautiful. She pressed my head against the plush leather armrest and knelt up on the chair, lining up the head of her drooling cock with my sickly ear and whispering something kind and final: "Here's the medicine you've been waiting for, bitch." 

Nothing could ever help me understand the science behind her magic, she has since tried to explain to me the combination of chemistry and hypnotherapy that she deployed in my subjugation but it just never quite makes sense. And I never quite care, recalling the way she drizzled her seed into my ear—the sound of it collecting at the bottom and muffling the outside world that only made sense with her holding my hand—and finding peace in my own simple truths. Goddess pumped my head full of medicinal cum, pressing me into the armrest with just her musky erection as I yet reeled from the taste of toes I'd come to yearn for more than I care to admit, and the remedial semen punctured the inner ear like an egg to conceive a new future for the subject she'd chosen. 

The ringing went away, replaced with new sounds that only I could hear; voices swam inside my head, and every day gave birth to new rules I had no choice but to follow. Jessica's voice, which had temporarily become a cocoon of silence, metamorphosed into the dulcet tones of a real Goddess. Her word is law, is nature, and who am I to defy the rules of nature?

It was the beginning of a bright new existence, curled up at the feet of a perfect being who never let me suffer in silence ever again. 

Today is a Wednesday. It makes no difference to me, of course, because every day is exactly the same; I wake up and I serve Goddess until it's time to go to bed. My body's natural clock wakes me up at the appropriate time and I heed the swimming voices in my ear that compel me onwards into the kitchen. I need to make my Goddess breakfast while She sleeps in, it'll be my pleasure. 

After a half hour of slaving away in the kitchen for Her, I step quietly into the chambers of my Goddess and find that She's already awake, stressing over some complicated paperwork a drooling pet like me could not begin to decipher. I am helpful in so many ways, I try to learn as many useful methods of serving Goddess as humanly possible, but my intelligence took a major hit when She fucked absolute compliance into my head forever. I can feel Her cum in my brain, degrading my academic capacity while guiding me to more techniques of pleasure and servitude. 

With a small bow, I place the tray of fresh waffles and chopped fruit beside Her with a tall glass of homemade cold-brew I slaved away at perfecting for Her specific tastes. Goddess Jessica only half turns Her head, before telling me just how stressed She is. That can only mean one thing, when spoken to a stress-toy like myself. 

Crawling under Her desk is a familiar ritual for a thing like me, and I do so this time with no trouble at all. While I want nothing more than to gorge myself on these soles and toes like the wanton footwhore I am, I understand that my catharsis is second to Hers—in fact, my own personal satisfaction is far, far beyond secondary. My thumbs push into the balls of Her feet and massage them just the way She likes, forgetting that I even exist at all for the next wonderful hour of my life as I once again return to that world of pumping song. 

I can only pray, as I do each and every time my Goddess uses me in such a manner, that I'll please Her enough to earn myself an encore this time. 

This time.