Skin and Bones

A Story by nk36n37e

So David and his men wept aloud Until they had no strength left to weep (1 Samuel 30:4)

As David walked through the halls in his school, he looked around and listened to the passing conversation. All he heard were scattered pieces of dialogue; half sentences and random words.

“Well if I’m going to go over to his house then he should know…”

“That’s honestly, like such a dumb…”

“You know, I don’t care what you mean. I have better…”

David didn’t understand any of it, but he envied whatever had occupied their heads. David was like a mouse in a bowling alley. Loud noises, and hundreds of feet stomping about on their own unique path scared and fascinated him at the same time. He felt like even though he was nothing but a single bee in a hive, he stuck out. He felt like no matter how many people surrounded him, he was the only one that mattered. He often thought of the quote from Jonathan Foer, “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.” There were so many people that he could never know and never meet, and he had not come to peace with that yet.

In this world of people that would come and go, David wanted to be something more. He would change the world before the world could change him. That was the plan, but life never worked that way.

Despit David’s greatest efforts, he couldn’t put aside his true trouble. He was fighting a bloody civil war inside of his soul. David was in a lot of pain, but didn’t have a single person to blame it on. He was trapped uncomfortably inside of his own skeleton, like a hostage held behind a one-way mirror. He wanted to scream, yell, cry out for someone to save him, but he had been taught to stay silent. You could tell that it was affecting him. Affecting his sleep, affecting his grades, affecting his family.

He wished that he could forget about it, forget about about the noises in his head, but another part of him says he needs to work through it. Just refill his prescription and stick to the script, but that was easier said than done. He wished he could slip out of his body and into one of the many lives that was crushing him not a moment ago. He would go to school with a plastered smile on his face, talk smart about philosophy, and politics like it was all that was important in the world. Then he’d go home and weep. He’d cry until his body dried up and tears wouldn’t flow anymore.

He walked over to his dresser and looked at the wall behind it. He picked up the red marker and brought it up to the calendar. X-ing out another day, he wiped his tear-stained face and tried to ignore the growing migraine in his head. He thought about what his therapist recommended, a new treatment that had a high success rate, but had only had a handful of patients try it out. It was imagining a gun, putting it to your head, and pulling the trigger. The therapist had said that, “It puts the control in your hands. If someone points a gun at you, you feel scared, threatened. That’s because other people are unpredictable. But you can’t outsmart yourself. You pull the trigger, and for a split second, you lose everything. That feeling doesn’t stay, but it takes away your pain, one click at a time…”

He didn’t like the idea of it. He had never been suicidal, or even thought about it really, so the sound of the “treatment” wasn’t pleasing to his ears. It had apparently worked before, but for right now, the calendar was fine. He told himself that the pain would be gone soon enough, he would find away to push it out of his soul. He would put it neatly in a box, and stick it on a high shelf, but life never worked like that.

He was driving back from school, already the tears like traffic waiting for eyes to give up and pile through, when someone in a sports car rammed him from the front at around 80 mph. David didn’t tense up or brace himself, he just smirked and shook his head softly. No one would ever know why he was going so fast, or why David’s body died despite only suffering minor wounds compared to the other driver.

David never thought he’d lose his burden, but as he lay there in the wreck, grinning like a madman, he felt a little little weight lift of his bones…

© 2015 nk36n37e

Author's Note

Looking for feedback. This story is loosely connected to another story I wrote, "Hero in the Night", so if you like this, please go read that too. Thanks!
-Noah