The 42nd second of the clip is where the sound of the world begins to fray at the edges, and Orion R. knows it better than the pulse in his own wrist. He is leaning forward, the pressure of his headphones creating a dull ache against his temples that has persisted for at least 32 minutes. As a closed captioning specialist, his entire existence is measured in the micro-movements of air-the way a door creak translates into a visual cue for someone who has never heard wood groan. He stares at the monitor, his eyes tracking a waveform that looks like a jagged mountain range from a 1982 video game. The character on screen is weeping, but it is a silent, internal sort of grief. Orion has to decide if this is [sobbing] or [rhythmic breathing]. There are 12 frames of difference between empathy and clinical observation, and right now, with his stomach screaming for the calories he denied it at 4:32 PM, the distinction feels like a matter of life and death.

Quantifying the Pause

I started this diet exactly 72 minutes ago, and already the world is filtered through a lens of deprivation. It makes me empathize with Orion R. in a way I didn’t expect. We are both looking for what isn’t there. He is looking for words for the voiceless; I am looking for a feeling of fullness in a day that feels increasingly empty. The core frustration of his job, and perhaps the core frustration of being alive in this hyper-digitized era, is the inability to capture the nuance of a pause. We have 102 different ways to describe a scream, but how do we caption the specific, heavy silence that follows a breakup? How do we transcribe the sound of a dream dying in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon? We try to quantify it, to turn it into data, but the data is just a skeleton.

Orion R. once spent 82 hours on a single 122-minute documentary about deep-sea exploration. There was a sequence where the camera simply floated in the dark for 2 minutes. The director insisted that the silence wasn’t empty; it was pressurized. Orion tried 32 different variations of [low-frequency hum] before he realized that the director was right. The silence was a character. But the technical constraints of his software-a legacy program from 2002-didn’t allow for the word ‘pressurized’ to be used in a caption. He was limited to 32 characters per line. He was trying to fit the weight of the Atlantic Ocean into a box the size of a matchbook. This is the contrarian angle that people miss: we think closed captioning is for the deaf, but it’s actually a mirror for the hearing. It reveals how little our words actually matter compared to the cadence of our breathing.

The Slip of the Fingers

My own breathing is shallow as I contemplate the 2 stalks of celery waiting for me in the kitchen. I made a mistake around 12 minutes ago by looking at a photo of a sourdough loaf. It was a tactical error. Orion makes mistakes too, though his are archived in the Library of Congress. Once, in a 1992 sitcom rerun, he accidentally captioned a background character’s cough as [metaphorical thunder]. It was a slip of the fingers, a 2-second lapse in concentration, but it changed the entire subtext of the scene for 22,000 viewers. People wrote letters. They wanted to know what the thunder symbolized. Was the character a god? Was it a foreshadowing of the protagonist’s downfall? Orion had to explain that he was just hungry and tired, and his mind had wandered to a storm he had seen in 1972.

Labeling the Ghost

I’m thinking about the way we over-explain ourselves. I do it too. I’m doing it right now to distract myself from the fact that I want a pizza with 12 toppings. We use 222 words when 2 would suffice because we are terrified of being misunderstood. We are terrified of the [intense silence]. Orion R. isn’t terrified of it anymore. He has spent too much time inside it. He has learned that the most profound moments in cinema, and in life, are the ones where the captions should just read [ ]. A blank space. A moment for the viewer to fill with their own ghosts. But the regulations, the 1992 standards of broadcast, don’t allow for blank spaces. You must provide a description. You must label the ghost.

This leads to a deeper meaning that most of us ignore. By labeling everything, we strip the world of its mystery… Orion pointed out that ‘invitation’ is a noun, not a sound. They argued for 12 hours. In the end, they compromised on [ambient quietude], a phrase that Orion still hates 22 years later. It feels too academic, too far removed from the raw, bloody reality of a human being standing in front of a lens.

The Specialist of Self

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being a bridge between worlds. Orion R. goes home and sits in a room with 12 clocks, only 2 of which are set to the correct time. He likes the discordance. He likes that the ticks don’t line up. It reminds him that time isn’t a single, flat waveform; it’s a series of overlapping echoes. I feel that echo in my stomach. It’s a physical manifestation of a choice I made at 4:02 PM. The relevance of this, of Orion’s struggle and my own self-imposed hunger, is that we are all trying to find a way to make our internal states visible. We want someone to caption our lives. We want to look at the bottom of the screen and see [feeling slightly better now] or [finally understanding the point].

But there is no specialist in a booth for us. There is only the 52-year-old man in a dark room in Burbank, trying to decide if a teardrop hitting a table makes a sound. (It doesn’t, but Orion often adds [soft tap] anyway, just so the viewer knows it landed). We are all adding our own [soft taps] to the world, hoping they resonate. We are all trying to navigate the 1222 miles between what we mean and what we say. I’ve realized that my diet isn’t about the food; it’s about control. It’s about trying to caption my own urges. It’s as futile as Orion trying to describe the smell of a rose through a text box.

The Untranslatable Space

I’m going to go eat a single almond now. It will weigh approximately 2 grams. It won’t be enough to stop the hunger, but it will be a punctuation mark in a day that has been far too long. Orion will finish his shift at 8:02 PM. He will walk out into the cool evening air, and for the first time in 52 hours, he won’t have to caption anything. He will listen to the city, to the 12 different sirens in the distance and the 2 lovers arguing on the corner, and he will let the sounds remain just as they are: beautiful, messy, and entirely untranslatable.