Broken Silence

My friends say that ambient noise helps them sleep. They say that the incessant monotony soothes them like nothing short of drugs can. The static, or whatever noise they choose, carries them to such a deep sleep that they describe it to me as if I've never rested. A foreign delicacy worth boasting about. White noise has never done this for me. For as far back as I can remember all repetitive noise grated against my ears. It's gotten to the point where it’s rare for a day to pass without having to relocate due to noises that pierce my hearing protection.

Recently, yet another specialist has closed the door on the preferable diagnosis of some form of autistic sensory issue. The ride home was the only time I’ve regretted using a rideshare app. An hour of forced bland conversation drained me of energy I didn’t even know I had. The specialist, by denying me disability, had taken my chance at being able to attend this school without loans. This stripped me of the will to understand my problem. It took me days to get back on my feet, literally. I believe it was 4 days without eating or leaving my bed before I finally went outside. I had planned on catching up on my schoolwork. 

My friends found me crying in the library. The group had found their next project and would not sleep until I was fixed. Immediately they went to work on their phones, certain they would be able to not only work out what I had, but cure it. I felt so much shame watching them work. Their research brought to light something called immersion therapy. Honestly, what they described sounded imbecilic. Despite this, before my tears had even dried, I allowed their ignorant confidence to turn me into a follower.

 They pontificated on the results of their 10 minutes of reading headlines as if they had created the technique themselves. The entire conversation was haphazardly sprinkled with Wikipedia trivia and recovery rates stated in statistical terms they could not explain. They talked over each other in the tones of children explaining to their parents why they needed a new toy. Parsing out the facts from fun facts I gathered that the core concept is that one will become less triggered by something if they come to know it better. That by spending time with it, whatever it is, you tear it from the cackling, backlit, and overwhelming image you've created of it in your mind. You come to recognize it as what it is, and nothing more. Jacob was the only of them to ask me what I thought. I asked why they were bringing up a treatment for phobia when I was, at least to my knowledge, not at all terrified of the sounds that triggered me. Jacob was tuned out as they smothered my concern and eventually their confidence, once again, won over my doubt. I was obviously scared of getting better and -even though they found that endearing- it was time for change. 

Twelve minutes were spent in the local Chinese takeout place without my ear plugs. We had waited until the place was empty and I ordered general tso’s chicken in order to seem like a normal customer. My friends watched from a car outside, smoking while I sat sneering at my unopened meal. The mechanical whirring of two ceiling fans mingled with the dissonant rumble of an air conditioning unit that sounded older than me. My composure began to chip away the moment I became aware of these sounds. 

After a minute I found that no matter how I adjusted my posture I could not sit correctly. Sweat slicked loose hair to my forehead and my knee began to bounce under the table. This works, I assured myself. My head fell to my palms. No matter how hard I pressed my fingers against my eyes I could not stop seeing and feeling things I did not want to. The shape of my bones in my body, pressing against flesh, against the booth seat. The inconsistency of the air being blown down on my sweating skin. 

If I pulled at my skin hard enough, I could stop feeling. The cacophonous trill drilled into my skull. It filled my mind and crowded me until I was cordoned off to its darkest recess. I thought, if I dug deep enough, I could find what was causing this. It's inside me, after all. My right hand crossed my chest and pinched a good amount of flesh above my collar bone, I wanted to shred it away. I tugged and pinched but could not get a good enough grip on the sweaty leather that bound me. Eventually my nails dug in but no matter what I did I couldn’t free myself. Our bodies are strong, it's the mind that's weak. The next two hours are blank.

Only Jacob messaged me after that night. He refused to meet me in person. According to him the group got into an argument and stopped watching me after three minutes or so. They only looked up when they heard me scream. The word they settled on, after much deliberation, was feral. He said he’s never seen me, or anyone else, move the way I did. 

“When we looked up the guy from the register was standing behind you, concerned, and he put his hand on your shoulder. You grabbed at his hand while screaming bloody murder.” I could remember the screaming, the terror. “You crawled up onto your seat in the booth, holding onto the couple fingers you latched onto and breaking them every way you could while just… writhing. You just launched yourself at him. Shouting, flailing and beating him like a cornered monster. That was the worst part, man. You looked terrified the whole time. Even when his hands dropped down.”

I learned later from the paper that I was “assumed to be under the influence of hard drugs” by the owner, who had the police on speed dial for people who try to dine and dash. My story was told by a woman with far too much concealer on, who segued to the mayor's speech on the bath salt epidemic. I would have thought I was high, too. Jacob explained that I only stopped when the cashier's father came out of the door to the kitchen with a knife. Apparently I had screamed even louder than earlier, almost howling, holding my hands above my head and kicking on the ground pathetically to get away. I slammed against the far side wall, sobbing while the clerk lay on the ground, limp. Jacob explained that everyone agreed to not tell the police they knew me out of fear that the most popular of the group would lose her scholarship. The police questioned them for hours but their story of getting distracted in an argument before entering the place held up. Jacob said I owed him for not telling the police that his dash cam was on. I never responded to that last message.

When I came to, I was upside down laying in a shrub outside the only church in town. I had no memory of what had happened. Two of my nails were ripped off, my knuckles were raw, and the flesh above my collarbone was scratched viciously. I didn’t look at my leg but I knew something bad had happened. What stood out was that my clothes smelled more of oil and soy sauce than blood. I don’t know why but the first thing to come to mind was how horrible it would be to come home from work like that, stinking up your house, your bed. For some reason, though, my body didn’t concern me at all. My mind was absolutely empty, perfectly clean. 

It began to snow. The sun had just set and the day was settling into night. Houses lined the road, each one decorated for Christmas. It was beautiful and noticing such a thing was a big deal for me. As I walked I felt, inch by inch, the tightness of my face loosen. Muscles I didn't even know I was flexing relaxed in such a pleasant experience I actually began to cry. My day to day expression felt like a scowl. 

The gorgeous amber of the set sun slathered the bottom of any clouds above head, splashing resplendent reliefs against the deep blue nothingness above. Telephone poles and wires cut their definite shape out of the sky as their attached lights cast tired warm light onto the snow below. Underneath them snowflakes caught the light beautifully, falling in the still air. I stood under one of the streetlights until my fingertips lost feeling, catching the flakes on my tongue, or trying to as they fell onto my face. I laughed to myself quietly, in a way I don’t remember doing before. I actually considered skipping back to my dormitory before nearly slipping on a patch of black ice. 

Eventually I made it home, waking the next day half slumped over my bed with crusty patches of dried blood gluing my clothes to my body. The air stood still as I watched dust catch the dry light pouring in through the window. It had been perfect that night, in the snow.  Eventually my reminiscing was cut short by my phone's notification of Jacobs' most recent message. That was when I finally read, in great detail, what I had done. I stood in my clothes in the shower, staring at the empty space above the faucet as Jacobs' onslaught of texts fermented in my mind. The pounding of droplets calmed me, now that I had my ear plugs to silence them. My memory was spotty at best but I could remember enough then to know he wasn't lying. 

My muscles felt as though they should burn off any water that touched them. When I looked down I saw I was leaking a tired but consistent trail of diluted red to the drain. I still don't know when the chunk of flesh was cut from my calf. It looked like it could have been cut climbing a fence. After being wrapped tightly it stopped bleeding but every time I move it, even now, it begins to bleed. I planned to go to my next class but the blood I dropped on the carpet consumed my day. I had just finished cleaning when my roommate, a computer major who spends days at a time out and about campus, came back with the school newspaper in hand. I couldn't help but notice the front page as he scanned the clubs section for something about his recent “revolutionary” breakthrough. 

“I swear man, when I become the head of the IT club we won’t even have to bother with the local news crap. The Times will send people out to see what we're doing here.” I pretended to not hear him as I read my own book, legs crossed on my bed. “Dude.” My eye twitched. “Come on you can’t just act like you don’t hear me, I know you can, even with those hearing aids turned off.” “They’re ear protection.” A second dragged along. “What?” Another painstaking second passed. “They’re ear protection.” “What?” My lip twitched before I hissed out “very funny.” He laughed at his own joke and threw the newspaper at me. It broke into individual sheets and scattered over the room. His tone dropped, “I thought the computer guys were supposed to be the antisocial ones, you pretentious asshole.” He slammed the door on his way out. I climbed down, feeling warmth from my leg again. Right on the front cover was a picture of “The Dragons Rest Stop” which was apparently the name of the take out place. The clerk was going into surgery today, for tendon tears and knuckle fractures. They couldn't do anything about his face, or at least they couldn't afford it. The school paper started an online fundraiser for orbital bone surgery which was now at a staggering $22.38. It was funny, the father treated the interview like an advertising slot. I couldn’t tell if he was ignoring the reporter's implications that the attack was racially motivated or if he was actually too focused on mentioning, for a third time, how they will do their best to continue bringing the best to their customers despite this. I sucked my teeth when I saw the paper refer to it, undeservedly, as a restaurant.

The rest of the day passed slowly. I browsed countless makeup forums trying to find out how to hide the sections of raw flesh around my collarbone. Eventually I settled on bandaging and telling whoever bothered to ask that I was hiding hickeys. After this sleep took me gently, despite my wounds.

A feeling looked down at me like a stone wall. I knocked along its surface listening for a hollow tone, only to find that it had inched towards me. I turned away, only to find that I was surrounded by walls, all inching towards me in a march that only moved when not held by my gaze. I spun in circles, terror riding my frozen spine, until I felt a rough texture against my back. I pressed against it as hard as I could. My teeth grit against themselves as I pushed with my shoulder against the wall until I felt another wall press against my side. My eyes darted around the rock surface, there must be a door, a way out. In no time at all the walls had formed a hallway of the room. Only about 10 feet ahead of me stood the far side wall. I kept my eyes on the three walls ahead as the last slowly pressed me forward. My breath became shallow as my mind raced. The rubber soles of my shoes rubbed away into the floor as I jammed them into the crease. There were only 6 feet left.

To my astonishment I heard footsteps behind me, through the stone. I opened my mouth to scream for help but a terror flooded me at the thought of being discovered. "Stay silent, don't give him a reason." My own voice, a whispered curse that echoed inside my empty skull, everything fried away with fear. Rapid fire shallow breaths made my chest fill with fire as snot and drool dripped from my chin. A choked sob echoed through the room. The far side wall was only 4 feet away now. My knees gave below me, dropping me hard to the ground. I hit my legs fruitlessly before pulling my knees to my chest, I thought to bury my head in them, to look down, to give up. A sudden realization shot through me like lightning. I heaved up, pressing against the wall and stood with my legs pressed into the wall's corners. I bent down, towards the last wall, as low as I could. I held my breath until I felt the final wall pressed against my neck but now, bent down this low, each wall was frozen in my line of sight. A loud choked laugh sounded like a tired weep as a smile spread across my face. Tears streamed down my face as the weight of hopelessness fell off me like chunks of mud splattering on the stone floor. I was finally safe. 

My heart stopped as I heard a sound I've never heard before for the millionth time. A door ached open, rusty hinges grating against themselves. Through the open door came the sound of an air conditioning unit. It coughed and sputtered for seconds before being accompanied by a fan's looming drone. “I told you to be quiet.”

That's then I felt the ceiling pressing down on me.

The texture pressed itself into my sweaty back, crushing me into myself. My spine gave out first. As I felt the vertebra snapping out of place my left leg, which had collapsed under me longways against two walls, snapped in two. I became aware of my body as nothing more than flesh, something other than my life's vessel. It contorted and squeezed until I felt my chin press into the the skin of my stomach as broken bones shredded through muscle and exposed themselves. It didn't hurt in the way I thought it would, it burned. It burned more horribly than any burn I've felt. Eventually my skull came under pressure and the bones screamed against each other like a fork on a fine plate. The fan whirred on dispassionately as the air conditioner played me off into nothingness. I woke up as my skull gave.

Air flowed in and out of my lungs, my chest rose and fell but I felt nothing. I have no way of telling how long it took before I regained sensation but when I did it was different, tainted. My mind felt wholly focused on one thing, so much so that all else blurred into distant and foreign pieces of a poorly made set. An ache made itself known, deep in my chest. It pulled at me, my flesh, my spirit. My eye twitched. I felt less than alive. Dusting the window, framed in brilliant yellow, was snow. Catharsis. The ache pulled. Fragments of memories floated to the surface of a thick black pool. I turned away. My face felt so tight. I stared at my roommate asleep in his bed, realizing I never even bothered to learn his name. 

In a floating movement I was by his side. I used his face to unlock his phone and found his name was Nathan, he didn't seem like a Nathan. A Clark, maybe. Some rich name. I went to the bathroom and took his fancy razor apart. My bed creaked loudly but he did not wake. Using his phone I started an ambient noise video and closed my eyes.