Chapter 1

Have you ever seen the break of dawn? Been immersed in the blissful quiet of those first ray of light to break the horizon? It’s the experience of a lifetime, a time when you can look at everything around you and see the good in it. The break of dawn is when my thoughts about life first changed. I was taken at my very worst and brought to a better place...

Chapter 1

Five years, five years ago I lost my best friend. At the age of 12 my best friend was taken from me with the blink of an eye. I could never understand why he was taken, and I hated myself for not seeing it. For not being able to stop it. Was it my fault? I didn’t know for sure if it was or not, but I thought it was. That weight on my shoulders as a young child, started it all. 

“Where is he?” I would ask my mother. After awhile she had stopped answering, I guess it was just something she could never hope to explain to me. The fact that a 12 year old boy who was not supposed to have a care in the world was riddled with questions he shouldn’t have had to deal with, hurt her. I sometimes found her crying by herself in the kitchen late at night.

“Why are you crying?” I would ask her. She never answered that question either. She would just wrap her arms around me in silence. I figured the things she was crying about were grown up problems and I wouldn’t understand them anyway. Thats the way things were in my house, I never understood the things around me. I would sit alone in silence, I hated silence. Silence made me think, think about why my friend was no longer here, why my mother constantly cried and I could not help her. Silence became my enemy. My worst fear. Silence was what made the noises start coming from nowhere, which is when I got panicky. I would feel the room close in, and the anxiety kick up.

I began to feel alone in my own house, my mother seemed detached and my father had never been in my life. As an only child I was friendless, and it seemed motherless. I would try to escape the silence, I would talk to myself, project my thoughts aloud. Although, my thoughts were not always good. I even tried talking to the friend I had lost, even though he never talked back. Somehow, it made me feel less alone. Like I had somebody there to talk to, even though there never was. My mother was always there physically, but it seemed as if she had never cared to talk. She wasn’t with me in any other sense but in the room, in silence. 

The silence filled the house at daybreak, I was supposed to be asleep. My mother was pacing in the kitchen, she had been doing that more and more often. She was crying in her robe and started talking. There was nobody else in the house, but she was asking someone for something. For strength? Courage? I had no idea why she would need these things or who could give them to her. After awhile silence filled the house again, and I figured my mother had gone back to bed and so tried to. The silence kept me awake, it was too quiet to sleep. So I got out of bed and went to the kitchen...