Crimson Coloured Honey

Hush, she said. Hush, Hush, Hush, Hush. I was making too much noise and I knew it but I couldn't stop. She hushed me for balancing the disorganized and deafening silence. There was the turn of a page here, the click click of a computer's old, overused keys there and the steady humm flowing out of me. Hush, she says again, you're being too loud. I don't hear her. I am aware of what she is saying somehow, but her words are just syllables floating around me, beautiful little bees with their own buzz. They harmonize nicely with each other, coming together to form a sentence but they clash with my sound. The bees are attacking me and I cannot think or see clearly. It is too bright and yet too dark and I feel the weight of all the eyes in the building glaring at me, pushing at me from all sides as my humming builds until my voice begins to crack. She is yelling at me to stop and I catch a glimpse of her desperate eyes behind square, yellowed glasses, surrounded by lines etched into her face. She is not beautiful, although she appears wise, her shoulders permanently hunched from years pouring over her work. The librarian turns to my mother and screams at her to make me stop. A familiar hand touches my arm and I take a breath. And another. All my life I've been begged to make noise, form a word, a syllable, anything to prove that I am not as dumb as my teachers, my doctors, my family, my world, myself think I am, and I understand and I think and I try and nothing comes out but the steadying humm that my throat can't seem to stop making in between breaths. There are harmonizing whispers buzzing peacefully around my head, calming my nerves, flowing through me, infiltrating my senses in a pleasant way. My mother. She is calm. Patient. She never yells and knows how to steady me, to help bring the humm down to a barely audible whisper. She is honey and light and sets down her book as the librarian is telling us to leave. What is wrong with her, make her stop, she is disrupting everyone else here. Hush. My mother's book flies through the air and connects with the old librarian's head. She falls and she breaks the jar of honey as she trips over my beautiful mother, causing her to fall. There is an excruciating sound as her head cracks on the edge of the table. Where did the flying book come from? I see my outstretched hand, observe and analyse the shift in momentum between my legs and realize that it came from me. The humming stops. Or at least I think it does. I cannot hear it or the screams of the child down the hall. I feel my vocal chords vibrating roughly in my throat and yet hear nothing. I do not feel the pounding of my feet against the floor as I run. I do not feel the burning in my lungs as I run and run and continue to run until I see flashing red and blue lights and I cannot tell if they are from my fucked up brain or from a legitimate source. There is a bolt of pain and I am shaking and the world ceases to exist.

I wake in a cell. The humming has returned. Unfamiliar sounds and smells swarm around me. I want my mother's golden flow of words to wrap around me and ease the strain on my voice. I want her I need her iwantherineedheriwantherineedherrightnow. I am on my feet and banging against the metal bars and I recall how I got here. I see my mother on the floor, her head with a crack in the middle, spewing crimson liquid all over the book she was reading. I know it was my fault but I didn't mean to. I understand what I am doing and what I am thinking but I am not always in control of it. I want to ask about her and if she is alright, but I am trapped in a humming silence. Someone might tell me how she is if I was normal, if I was like anyone else is this place, but all they will ever see is my diagnosis and lack of control. They will not see my understanding, nor the person that I am or could become. I will be tried as the adult that I have recently become and found to be insane, placed in a mental institution. As I sit in a corner and begin to rock, I finally understand that all I am and ever will be is alone. I will not be understood or given a second chance. I will only ever be what others see me to be. I am my diagnosis. It's all I've been since I was three years old and my parents realized I wasn't developing as fast as the other kids. The only one who would talk to me like I was an actual human being was my mother. She saw me as beautiful and intelligent, things that no one would ever even bother to think about me, let alone say out loud, because I wouldn't understand them anyways right? I'm just a stupid waste of space that doesn't deserve the honour of hearing their words. I wish they could hear my thoughts. I have so much to say and no way to communicate. My thoughts swirl around their heads, invisible tendrils that my mind tries to bridge from mine to theirs but it never works. Someday, my mother would say to me. Someday we will find a way for your thoughts to fill the air. Someday they will understand. I suppose now they never will. I will live and die in a sterile white room and my thoughts will die with me. It ended when the last person told me to hush.