Mute

NOTE: This is an essay I had to write for English. I liked the way it sounded, so I decided to throw it up here. This is also a second draft and subject to heavy editing. Fire away.

I can remember his face if I meditate long enough. I see him sitting at a tattered wooden desk, his piercing blue eyes staring into mine and his brown, ashen hair falling clumsily off his head in awkward curls. He has taken a smile out and is displaying it proudly across his face, his single dimple revealing itself only then. We’re in the middle of our eighth grade history class and old Mr. Beauchamin has his backed turned to us, so naturally we aren’t paying attention. We make faces of contorted demons and backwater sprites at each other, hoping to drive the other into unrelenting giggle fits and half stifled chortles. He leans in closely to me and begins to speak. It comes out in a garbled whisper and I fall out of my head and back into my cinderblock dormitory. I’m by myself and outside the sun is going down. I am fully numb and slightly hungry, and so leave my room and travel to the dining hall, where I ate alone and mostly gone. On the way back to my room in the dark, I try to remember his voice, but all my memories are silent and slowly fading to black and white. I realize that I have forgotten his voice.

That night someone gets cheap beer and we arrange ourselves quietly in our room, trying to be as quiet as cockroaches in the closet least we reveal our clandestine activities to the powers that be. My friend’s sit, liquor in hand and laughter pouring out of their mouths and I watch, mimicking heartfelt presence and genuine attention. My thoughts drift away from the four walls of the room and back into eighth grade. He is nervous, his smile more forced than usual. He speaks to me in silent whispers and I’m leaning forward to take in every syllable. The word pot falls out of his mouth and lands on my desk in sticky block print. I sit there listening to his silent story as he tells me, words erupting from his lips in cartoonish bubbles. He worries that everyone knows, that his parents will find out, that he’ll end up disgraced and alone on the streets. I smile a nervous smile at him and whisper reassurances. No one knows, it’s ok, I tell him with hidden uncertainty. He smiles back at me and he thanks me, forever mute and trapped in my head.

I’m back in the booze room and someone is sloppy drunk. We worry about someone catching us, so we try and contain their good time as best we can. We begin dropping like flies, falling into drunken fits, writing nonsense poetics on our arms and rolling around the room in drunken bliss. I join in, detached and rambling. I try to picture him there with us, but he remains the hazy, mute outline of a fourteen year old boy that I have kept with me all these years.

I climb up into my bed, my body still humming, my body teeming with false emotions. I lie there and listen to the gentle breathing of my roommates as they drift away into whatever hollow husk of a dream they make their home at night. I drift off slowly, my last thoughts images of him, on the last day I saw him alive.

It’s graduation and I’m surrounded by family and fast fading acquaintances. High school is approaching quickly, and nerves are just beginning to sink their teeth into my flesh. My classmates and I gather outside after the ceremony is complete. We pose for a picture; clothes pressed and ironed, our smiles hopeful. I look around at faces that will slowly fade away into the white noise that is a constant hum in my memories. I am going my way, and the rest are heading theirs, and with the flash of a bulb we a captured forever in our final moments as innocents, our relationships intact and our psyche mostly sane. I look over at him. He is red faced and beaming in the June sun and he looks back at me, a look of pain slowly spreading. His smile melts away and gives way to a troubled frown. I watch as our friends turn to ash and are blown away on the rising wind. Walls spring up around us, and he yells to me, mute as always. His eyes and face are reflecting the fire that is consuming his family. I try to move towards him, but I have become part of the woodwork, rooted and helpless. He continues to stare, his body slowly decaying into thick acrid smoke. He is gone and I stay as the house burns and burns and soon I can feel the fire creeping up towards me and I’m choking on smoke and I can feel the fires sharp fingers dig into my clothes and my skin and I’m on fire and screaming and screaming as I’m consumed in the inferno and the house is crumbling and a woman is screaming and I want to be away far away from the smoke and the death and the fire and I want it to end I want the pain to stop but it isn’t it just keeps burning and screaming and tearing and eating and I’m screaming screaming screaming-

I’m awake, safe in my bed with my sheets twisted into great ropelike knots. My body dripping with fear and sweat and my head is buzzing. It’s three A.M and my roommates breathe quietly and slow, lost in their own dreamscapes. I look towards their sleeping forms and feel envy creep past the sleep deprived fog and into my emotional core. I take a deep breath and smell beer hanging heavily in the air. I feel like I’m going to be sick, but I push it back and lay in my bed, until finally exhaustion sets in and carries me away into a black, empty sleep.

I wake in the morning to silence and an empty room. My roommates have left to continue their lives and I am left in their tumultuous wake in the form of an exhausted and mostly incomplete individual. I go about my usual routine of bathing and set myself down to meditate and read when I am interrupted by vibrations in my pocket. She wants to get together for a late lunch, and I begrudgingly set down my book, abandoned my plans of enlightenment and set off to meet her.

It’s cold outside and the snow is a crystalline white. I pull my thin coat closer to my body and tuck my already frozen fingers into my pockets. The sight of the snow and the feel of the frost drag me back from reality and into mist.

I’m home, a freshman in high school. He is dead now, and I’m looking at the still smoldering remains of his life. The snow around the charred remains is gone and a truck lies melted to their short gravel driveway. Smoke curls up from the torched ground and disappears among the green evergreens that hang above like eternal giants leering down from on high. I close my eyes and try to grab hold of his voice, but it’s gone, lost somewhere in the dark. I do not feel sad staring at the remains of his life, only numb detachment. He had been with me in life, sometimes hiding in the back and sometimes on the front lines beside me. He was gone now, his memory curling up with the smoke and disappearing somewhere far overhead.

She didn’t show up. I eat lunch alone, adrift in a sea of strangers. I watch as the faces drift by, each one melting into the next. I watch them and wonder what it would be like to talk to them, to connect, to create memories and stories to call upon late at night when no one is around and the room is perfectly hush. I watch them and wonder what it would be like to feel that bond, but the devil grabs my ear and whispers that All Bonds Are Temporary and that Everything Vanishes. Then the devil turns my face and flashes that photograph from graduation, and I see my specter staring at me, his one dimple showing, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember his voice.