Dec 28th, 2025
Have you ever been irritated by something so small that it makes you hate the person attached to it? Something like the sound of someone chewing their food. Or their breathing. Even when it comes from someone you know, someone close. I hate it.
There’s something about those sounds that makes my blood boil, the same way the servant feels in The Tell-Tale Heart. Imagine it: food being crushed inside a mouth, air moving in and out of someone’s respiratory system. So… revolting. Sometimes I wish I could just shut their mouth and plug their nose with something, anything, so the noise would stop.
Am I crazy? A psycho, just for thinking this? Am I wrong for feeling this way? I can’t just end everyone’s life like in Poe’s story, can I? The servant was loyal to his master, after all. No grudge, no passion… just an inability to bear the old man’s evil blue eye and the sound of his beating heart. Nothing personal. Just something deeply disturbing.
And there’s this irresistible urge to tell the truth. Would they be angry if I told them to chew more quietly? That it’s disgusting to hear someone else’s mouth work like that? (Now I’m thinking of Phantom Thread (2017).) Or to tell them to take better care of themselves so they don’t sound like their larynx is struggling? Learn to breathe, please.
Apparently, the only thing I can really do is nothing… wait patiently and hope they realize on their own that it’s disturbing. But patience, as we know, has limits.
As the story goes, the servant eventually kills the old man just to rid himself of the evil blue eye and the sound of the beating heart. And yet, even after hiding the body perfectly, he can’t bear the lie when the police interrogate him. The heart keeps beating in his head. Louder. Louder. Until he confesses.
And that’s kind of how I am. I end up telling people what I find disturbing about them, not because I dislike them, but because the noise or what they do won’t stop in my head.
So maybe that’s it. Maybe sometimes telling the truth, even when it hurts, is better than keeping it to yourself. Because keeping it inside might drive you mad in the end. Like Squidward eating Krabby Patties over and over, ignoring that he’s already full, until his thighs explode.
Well… here’s just another wandering thought that lingered, brought to you by Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
Wandering Monologues 