Entry Eight

I woke on the first night in the Alpha Theta dorm with a start.  Apparently the party still hadn’t stopped.  I looked at my bed side alarm clock where the display read 4:19.  At the stroke of 4:20 I heard an uproar followed by the bubbling of at least a dozen water bongs.  This was followed by unchained laughter and a chorus of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.

In the next ten minutes there was more laughter, some chanting and all of this was set the thumping bass from a Led Zeppelin Techno crossover.  I was about 4:30 when I could take the noise on longer.  I had class at ten A.M. and I still needed a shower.  I don’t know where the voice came from, I was shocked when I heard it.  “Shut the hell up.”  An uproar of laughter.  That voice was mine.  I was scared.  It was so unexpected.  I felt in that moment that my life had begun to spin madly out of control.  

I looked over to see Connor sitting bolt upright in his bed.  This would’ve been more shocking if I had realized at that time how deep of a sleeper he was.  He was staring straight at me.  It made me uncomfortable.  I laid back down and cradled my pillow in my arms for whatever comfort it would bring me.  The noise died down after a few minutes and I fell asleep.

I couldn’t explain what had happened the night before, so I was a bit annoyed when Connor followed me around the dorm all morning as if he was waiting for an answer.  Finally, when he almost followed me into the bathroom for my morning shower I put my foot down.  “Bite me,” I told him under my breath in a weak, scratchy voice.

It worked.  He stopped in his tracks and I was able to shower in peace.

It took nearly six months before I could talk when I wanted to and not just when I felt possessed to.  It was a hard thing to control, the urge to speak, when I learned that it was again possible.  I wanted to walk around all day striking up conversations with people, asking “how is your day,” and stating my absolute delight when they said it was good.  I learned to control my tongue though.  I feared that I might become one of those people who talked and talked and never had anything to say.  I realized that my words had much more impact when the people hearing them hadn’t heard me speak before.  It shocked my words into them, made them remember what I had to say, and it seemed people respected me for this.  Not that anyone really wanted to be my friend, but now I had their respect.  

After three months,  I decided that I could speak well enough that I might be able to talk to her.  In retrospect I regret waiting that long.  I wish that I had gotten caught up in some impulse and went and shared my first words with her.  Maybe then things would’ve been different.  

Ten A.M.  Bus stop in town.  It was raining as if God himself was crying in torrents.  Under the little rain shelter I sat alone.  Thankfully alone.  People always want to talk to overcome some awkwardness that have about being around a person in silence.  Or silence in general.  Now, there are people who sleep with their TV’s on, ride with the radio and it would seem that they you were asking them to peel off their own eyelids to ask them to turn it off.  I think that’s why people develop voices in their head.  I think that’s one reason why the number of people with schizophrenia is steadily rising.  People just can’t stand moments of silence in this world anymore.  Why do you thing iPods are so damn popular?  

It’s because we have things inside of each and every one of us that come to us when there is no sound.  Disturbing, depressing, anxious thoughts, it could be any of them.  We can’t cope so we turn up the stereo.  

I’m not saying I don’t have my issues like that, I just know how to deal with them.  I make those voices work for me, motivate me.  I could’ve never recovered, never made any progress if I had just shoved ear buds in my ears for the rest of my life.

Still, I had my ways of avoiding this idle chatter.  I had a newspaper under my arm, so that I could start reading the tripe and gossip if anyone came around.  You see, it isn’t the fact that you are trying to read that keeps people from trying to talk to you when you’re reading a newspaper, no, it’s all in the way you hold it.  People react to faces, it’s just the way we’re wired, and if you hold the newspaper up in front of your face like a little barricade, if they can’t see your face, then there is no reaction from them, no reason for them to want to start a conversation with you.

On the bus that’s exactly what I did, I held up the paper strong and proud, and no one bothered me the whole ride.  I only bothered myself.  

I saw her face.  Somewhere I would have never expected.  The obituaries.  It said that her death was a suicide, and I couldn’t help but feel responsible.  The only thing that they could find for a suicide note said simply, “I only wanted to hear your voice again.”  I couldn’t help but think that the note was addressed to me.  

At the next stop I got off the bus leaving the newspaper on the seat as I left.  I was somewhere between her place and my dorms.  I walked through the rain, which continued all day, back to the frat house.  I remember thinking that it was a blessing that it rained that day.  That way no one could distinguish the streaks of tears from the pouring rain that battered me.

Connor welcomed me home with open arms that were warm when he wrapped them around me.  He wasn’t shy about it, holding me as I wept, even though I was soaked through and through.  He waited patiently for the words that wouldn’t come as I cried in his arms.

What could I say that would make any difference at all?  I could see no way that talking would do anything other than bring him down to my level at that moment.  Later I told him all about the visit to be after I realized that not knowing was eating away at him from the inside.  After I made that confession, he made one of his own.  

The reason that he had been away at the beginning of the year was for the treatment of Osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer.  The pain it caused, I was surprised that he had ever been able to keep up with me as we ran up the stair of the university together.  Before long I realized what could have made him make that sacrifice to begin with, and why he had stuck with me for the last few years.  He knew he didn’t have long left, and he wanted to make some impact on the world, healing me, for example.  I was the proof that he would have when he left this world that he had lived, that he had made a positive impact ion the world.  

I didn’t exactly like the idea of being a trophy, but his intentions were good and if that was his dying wish then I would do nothing to spoil it.  I thanked him, though I never told him why.  He accepted the thanks, and I think that somewhere inside he must have known.

I wish I had asked him, I wish I had at some point found out for sure.  He went back into the hospital by that summer.  This time he let me know.  Even his family didn’t know.  He was afraid they would ruin their credit trying to get him the best treatment there was.  He told me something that I had never realized.  That first school I had gone to, he was there as well, he had seen me crying in the hall just before I left and just after that semester into the university we were both attending now.  

He was at the community college for much the same reason I was, his family didn’t have the money to send him, so he applied for grants and with the grades he would later earn, scholarships, just as I had done.  In fact, I soon realized, as I visited him day by day in his hospital bed, that we were a lot alike.

He had moved into the Alpha Theta house not only because it was free but because there were people there that were in disrepair, people that needed a persistant shoulder to cry on like his.  

By the middle of the summer the pain was often too intense for him to even talk.  So I talked for him, about all the things I had learned, all the good and bad in my life, as he lay there and patiently listened.  I grew to value my life more and more as I recounted all of my happy memories to him.

It was the end of summer when the cancer spread into his lungs.  Near dead, and always knocked out with a continuous stream of morphine he was already gone.  Still I visited daily, until school started again, and then almost daily.  I thanked him every day until the nurse told me why his room was suddenly empty.

He died before midterms.

I couldn’t take this on top of losing her.  Everyone in my life was gone now, passed away into their graves.  In class as we read about friends and loving relationships I stared at the page blankly.  All I could imagine was a knife with a jagged edge dragging across my throat.  It was a beautiful fantasy in its own way.  An end to all my waking pain.  But I remembered him on his death bed; even though the morphine rendered him unable to feel or even be awake, still he grimaced in his dreams from the sheer magnitude of his pain.

But, even having to endure all of that, he never once gave up.

I had to live on, I had to find a way to fix myself, for him.  It was his dying wish and I had to respect that.

That was how I ended up in that doctors office, asking for something to make me forget.  He said he had just the thing.  He handed me the little black vial as if it were the answer to my prayers.