26 Seconds 

By Jessica Krzysiak 



“Imagine you’re in the ocean,” Noah said, his voice steady but distant, like he wasn’t just speaking to his son, but the entire world. “You hear the waves rise and crash—but do you believe they truly end?”

Kaiser looked up from his coffee, waiting.

“The sound fades, sure,” Noah continued, “but that wave... It’s still moving. Beneath the surface, its energy goes on, reshaping the ocean in ways you’ll never see.”

Kaiser stirred his drink absently, not answering.

“We believe in gravity, in magnetism—not because we see them, but because we see their effects. But other forces—radio waves, brain waves—surround us constantly. Invisible. Untapped. Frequencies that shape our world, whether we acknowledge them or not.”

Kaiser raised an eyebrow. “You mean, like... vibes?”

Noah smiled at that. “Frequencies,” he said. “Real ones. Not just emotion. Literal fields. Vibrations. Energy forms. They’re everywhere. Available to anyone. Some will drown you. Others can lift you off the ground—if you know how to tune in.”

He paused to sip his coffee and winced at the lukewarm bitterness, but said nothing about it.

“You mean metaphorically, of course?” Kaiser asked, glancing at his smartwatch.

Noah tilted his head, amused. “Do I?”

“Waves are how energy moves through everything,” Noah said, tracing a spiral in the air with one finger. “Water. Light. Sound. Even thought.”

Kaiser says nothing. 

“Your brain runs on waves,” Noah continued. “Measurable ones—beta, alpha, delta. Each tied to a different state of awareness.”
He tapped the side of his temple lightly, like tuning a dial.

“Your organs vibrate. Your cells hum.” He looked toward the street, where a breeze rustled the leaves of a sycamore. “Even the Earth itself emits a pulse. The Schumann resonance. It’s real, recorded, and mapped. But most of us never sense it.”

Kaiser leaned back, arms crossed. “And we miss it because…?”

“Because we filter it out,” Noah said, softer now. “We’ve been taught to ignore anything outside our narrow sensory window. We see such a thin slice of reality.”

He rubbed his hands together, as if trying to warm himself with the fire of the idea.

“There’s a rhythm in the ocean—an actual pulse. Discovered back in the 1960s. A seismic throb every twenty-six seconds. They still don’t fully know where it comes from. It’s like the Earth’s heartbeat. And yet most people have no idea it exists.”

Kaiser raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, a lot of things were happening in the ’60s. This is starting to sound like a TED Talk on mushrooms.”
Noah laughed, genuinely. “I found those too. Briefly, but this isn’t about hallucinating. It’s about realizing what’s been here all along.”

He gestured toward the street outside. “Take radio waves. You’re walking through them right now. AM, FM, police bands, emergency beacons, and even your phone's signal. All of it is flowing through you at this very moment.”

Kaiser followed Noah’s gaze but saw only sunlight and passing cars.

“Before the invention of the radio,” Noah continued, “no one knew those waves existed. They were just as present then as they are now, but no one believed without the tool to detect and interpret them. No one could believe it. They were invisible, intangible. And yet, the moment someone built a receiver and turned the dial, suddenly, the air came alive.”

Kaiser crossed his arms. “So now you’re saying the brain is like a radio?”

“I’m saying consciousness is,” Noah replied. “You can tune it. You can raise or lower the frequency. You can be stuck on static for years without knowing the dial even moves. Most people are.”

“Right,” Kaiser said. “But if that’s true, then why doesn’t everyone just tune to the ‘right’ station?”

Noah nodded, almost expecting the question. “Because belief is the antenna. Most people run on broken or bent ones. Or they don’t even realize they have one. You can’t tune into something you don’t know exists.”

He looked out the window momentarily, “And even when someone tells them, they won’t believe it without proof. But just like those early radio waves, some truths can only be proven by the experience of receiving them.”

Kaiser leaned back in his chair and looked out the window as a bird dipped low and vanished behind the edge of a building. The metaphor landed harder than he wanted it to. “If we’re all surrounded by invisible frequencies, what happens when people tune in?” he asked. “Do they start levitating? Speaking in tongues?”

Noah grinned. “They become more themselves. They lose the noise. Their instincts sharpen. They make decisions with clarity. They sense when something’s wrong or right. They attract what they need because they’re aligned with it.”

Kaiser tapped a finger on his glass. “Okay. But you’re still asking people to believe in something they can’t see. That’s a hard sell.”
“True,” Noah admitted. “But remember the sun?”

Kaiser raised an eyebrow. “What about it?”

“You see it as yellow or orange. But that’s an illusion. The sun emits all wavelengths of visible light. White light. But the Earth’s atmosphere scatters the shorter ones—blue and violet. Rayleigh scattering. That’s why we think it’s yellow.” He smiled softly. “But if you saw it from space, without distortion, it would shine pure white. What you see isn’t always what is.”

Kaiser didn’t say anything.

“You think I’m asking you to trust a feeling,” Noah said. “But I’m asking you to notice what’s already happening. Like the radio. Like gravity. It was all here before we had names for it. Before we had theories.”

Kaiser stared out the window again. His reflection was faint and distorted. 

“What class do you have today?” Noah asked hopefully.

“Chem-33,” Kaiser said. He glanced at his phone. “And I’m late.” He stood quickly, slinging his backpack over one shoulder.

“You know,” Noah said, grinning, “time is an illusion too. Just another frequency interpretation.”

Kaiser smirked. “Dad.”

He hesitated, then added, “I love you. I’ll call you later.”

“I love you, too, son.” Noah’s eyes shimmered as he watched his son walk toward the door.

Outside, the sunlight felt warmer than before. A soft but insistent breeze moved through the trees. Kaiser walked across the quad, head down, his mind somewhere far beyond the lecture hall he was headed to.

Frequencies. Perception. Resonance. The twenty-six-second heartbeat. The invisible grid of signals he’d never paid attention to.
He thought about radios. They’d always seemed like magic as a kid—turning a dial and pulling sound out of thin air. When he was nine, he remembered his dad showing him how to build a crystal radio set in the garage. No batteries. No power. Just a coil, a diode, an antenna... and suddenly, music from nowhere.

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, tilted his head, and looked up. The sun gleamed overhead. For a moment, it did seem whiter. Brighter. Fuller. Something hidden had stepped forward to say: I’ve been here the whole time. Kaiser smiled.

“Maybe I’ve just been tuned to the wrong station.”