In A World All My Own
In A World All My Own
The wind whispers songs of hope to me, sending them in my direction on wispy tendrils of cloud. The tune is always one of despair, and yet, that is what gives me optimism. Hearing someone else’s misfortune has always made me feel safe, though I know that that is a sickening, selfish, wicked thing to say. I feel no qualms about saying it, however, even when not in the confines of my own head, for I know that my character is truly revolting and I am completely at peace with that fact. I quite like knowing that others can be hurt, too, just as I can; I don’t necessarily want anyone to be in pain, I just want to know that someone, somewhere out there, is like me. The wind is more than capable of providing me with my fix, my addiction to the sound of human pain, for the wind, unlike most things on Earth, will pick up even the most godforsaken little thing. The wind doesn’t care what it touches, it only cares about connecting the rejected .
I wonder if there are people out there who listen to my screams at night and imagine a life where I am their friend.
*
Waking up under an overpass, covered in debris, is never the most appealing way of awakening. It’s not merely the cold that entangles you in its grip or the stench of stale sex that surrounds you, but also the knowledge of why, why you’re sleeping outside in the shabbiest of conditions instead of in the warm house where you belong. It takes me about ten seconds of bleary eyed confusion before I realize what must’ve occurred. One look at the purple smudges on my arm, and my assumption is confirmed.
I shove my sleeve down so it covers all but the tips of my fingers and try not to wince as I haul myself up from the ground. Even when I’m alone, I try not to make a habit of showing pain. I think back to last night, how the wind chased me out of my house with the sounds of a drunken father and a drugged up mother and a couple of spoiled brothers. Those noises, they didn’t make me feel welcome; as it turns out, even the wind can be a traitor.
*
Sometimes I don’t sleep in my house for weeks on end and when I come back, nobody has really noticed I’m gone. It’s always the same as I left it, my mom in a chemically induced stupor, my father passed out. My younger brother, the most oblivious, the favourite, playing a video game that he most likely stole. It’s your typical dysfunctional home, and it irks me, annoys me so much that I feel cockroaches crawling under my skin at the unoriginality of it. I’m just your regular sob story, the kid with the addict parents who gets knocked around from time to time. I don’t want a life where everything is cotton-candy-dandy but I don’t want my life of squalor either. I just want something different, something extraordinary.
It strikes me how very contradictory I am, saying I want others to be like me, and then saying I want to be different. The truth is, I want everything, but I don’t care enough to take it for myself. I just don’t care.
The wind whistles lightly in my ear, the melody of a happier person’s life, of a small child picking daffodils. I picture shiny shoes and hair tied in ribbons and I smile in a vicious attempt at happiness while I think about how that person will one day lose everything, because everyone loses everything eventually. I just lost everything a lot sooner than most people. The figurative heart was created to be trampled on and pressured and tortured to its core and it’s futile trying to resist.
*
One day, my mother shoves me in our freezer. It’s one of those huge deep freezer things, and ours is empty so there’s lots of room. She puts me in there and she closes the door and I nonchalantly wonder if I’ll ever get out of there. A mere four minutes later, one of my brothers wrenches the door open and pulls me out.
“Lucky I was hungry,” he grunts. We both no he didn’t go in the freezer because he was hungry; he may never do much for this family, but everyone knows we don’t keep food in there. I think I should probably be grateful towards him, for finally caring, but find myself wondering what it would’ve been like, to lie in there slowly freezing, slowly, slowly dying. My brother shoves me and says, “Go take a shower and warm up, you moron,” but instead, I go outside in the wind, and let it whip back my long hair.
*
We’re at the dinner table for once, when my father throws a fork at me. “Boy,” he says, and I want to groan at what a trite word that is for someone like him to use. I grit my teeth and think of teacups with flowery patterns and furniture stores with bright orange plastic chairs. “Stop spacing out, boy, and eat this food that your brother prepared all by himself. Ungrateful whelp.” I drag my eyes away from my thoughts of sparkly pens and vibrant maracas to stare distastefully at the meal. It’s true, I think, but don’t dare say. My brother is fairly talented at preparing take out. All by himself.
I paste a china doll smile on my face and swallow a mouthful of soggy noodles and imagine that I’m really swallowing air, or hollow, hollow wind and it’s filling up my chipmunk cheeks. Later, on my knees in front of the toilet, I think of spattered paint on hard cement and lemonade stands in the sun. As I spew up everything in my stomach, I think of nails painted black with tiny white spiders.
*
Some days I actually go to school, and I sit there and wonder why I even bother. Other students give me a wide berth and try to pretend that I’m not there. Teachers shove missed work in my hands and ask me how I am, but they never follow through.
“And how are you today, love? You feeling okay now?”
“Fine.”
And that’s that. Because people don’t really want to hear the truth, they want to hear what will cause them the least amount of trouble and getting involved with helping me, that’s too much effort. In art, we’re told to paint a picture of time, and one girl, she paints a dead person and one person paints a plant. One particularly profound guy paints a clock. I, I paint a world with a magenta sky and vermillion ground, with pretty little wisteria clouds. My teacher asks me what that has to do with time, a little uncertainly, and the class stares at me, unashamedly. “In time,” I say, “This is what the world will look like.”
The teacher stares at me worriedly and the kids stare at me like I’m full-blown insane, and no one realizes it’s a joke, that I don’t actually believe the world is going to change colour. I wasn’t doing the assignment, I was doing my own assignment. I was drawing the world I’d like to live in, and because it’s a topsy-turvy world , it has no time. Time is just another limit on freedom, and I have enough of those.
Later, it strikes me that my painting almost appears as though bathed in blood.
*
I return home one night to find my mother gone and my father dead.
“She killed him,” my brother says in astonishment. “She… I mean, I always thought he’d kill her, but she just… and… out of nowhere, just stabbed him, and oh dear god, I was right there, and what am I supposed to do?”
Sometime between now and the last time I saw him, my brother has acquired emotions. It’s strange, how death can do that to people.
“And she bailed?” I say, indifferently. Apparently it doesn’t affect me. My brother nods, and I think he’s in shock, but can’t bring myself to do anything and I hate that, because I feel so hypocritical. I’m always accusing everyone of not caring, when I’m the one who cares the least.
“Think of nicer stuff,” I say to him, finally. “Like light reflecting off a CD, or lines on a ruler.” But suddenly, that’s not right, because there are a million ways that could go wrong, and those ways are happening in my head right now. The light is blinding me, reflecting into my eyes, and those lines on that ruler, they’re too constricting. I’m not making any sense, even to myself, but somehow even the pretty things aren’t pretty now, they all have faults.
Maybe death does have an effect on me, too, though I didn’t think it could settle in this quickly. I look outside, and it’s a calm day, leaves on the trees perfectly still.
“You’re not taking this seriously!” my brother screams, unaware of my inner turmoil. “You never take anything seriously! It’s like you’re never here! I mean, physically, you’re always off somewhere, thinking I don’t notice, for weeks at a time, and mentally you’re gone! At least when you leave the house, I know you’re coming back… But when you go off into your mind, man, I’m just not so sure.”
My brother looks so scared and I can’t even say anything to him, because every time I think I’ve got something to say in reply to that, it gets swallowed up by my other thoughts, thoughts of sword hilts encrusted with rubies. My pretty thoughts are tainted too now, though, for as I watch, in my mind’s eye, I see the sword cutting pretty patterns and it looks so nice, and I want to say something to my brother because he’s breaking down, but I just can’t concentrate.
“I apologize,” I manage, somehow, sounding horribly fake. “I have to go talk to my wind friends.”
And I can’t believe I just said that, because now he’s looking at me like I’m a nut job, and that’s almost as bad as his concerned look. I wish my mouth would shut up, but it’s not me talking, it’s never been, the wind is using my body for its own conversation. “They like me, you see. They’ve never seen me, so they don’t know how disgusting I am, how vile. They just hear my voice and I hear their voices and you wouldn’t understand, because you don’t get the wind like I do.”
My brother is backing away, and I can’t stop him because I won’t stop rambling on about the wind. “I’m just going to call an ambulance, okay? They can help you, I think you’re in shock finding dad like – no screw that, you’ve always been like this, haven’t you? And I can hardly call an ambulance, the police will take us in.”
I’m no longer paying attention to his distracted speech, focusing my mind instead on the sounds of insects feathery footsteps on the walls. I can hear them and they’re so close, and I wonder if they’d be my frie –
My brother slaps me, making my head snap around. When I look back, he’s shouting, “Listen, okay, we’ll manage without you. Just get out, okay, get out of here. You’re crazy, and I’d like to help you man, I really would, but I just can’t, so you need to leave and find your own way.” For some reason, my brain isn’t getting what those words mean; it hears them, but it can’t translate them into what ever language the wind speaks, whatever language it is that I speak.
Him pushing me out though, it’s not that hard to get. He looks so hurt as I leave, and my other brother isn’t even there yet, doesn’t even know, and I want to make my brother feel better, but the wind is calling and there’s nothing I can do. I have a new family now, and somehow they just can’t exist only in my imagination.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I hope it’s somewhere that has skies in shades of pink. I hope it’s somewhere that’s as flipped around upside down as I am.
I wonder if there are people out there who listen to my screams at night and imagine a life where I am their friend.
*
Waking up under an overpass, covered in debris, is never the most appealing way of awakening. It’s not merely the cold that entangles you in its grip or the stench of stale sex that surrounds you, but also the knowledge of why, why you’re sleeping outside in the shabbiest of conditions instead of in the warm house where you belong. It takes me about ten seconds of bleary eyed confusion before I realize what must’ve occurred. One look at the purple smudges on my arm, and my assumption is confirmed.
I shove my sleeve down so it covers all but the tips of my fingers and try not to wince as I haul myself up from the ground. Even when I’m alone, I try not to make a habit of showing pain. I think back to last night, how the wind chased me out of my house with the sounds of a drunken father and a drugged up mother and a couple of spoiled brothers. Those noises, they didn’t make me feel welcome; as it turns out, even the wind can be a traitor.
*
Sometimes I don’t sleep in my house for weeks on end and when I come back, nobody has really noticed I’m gone. It’s always the same as I left it, my mom in a chemically induced stupor, my father passed out. My younger brother, the most oblivious, the favourite, playing a video game that he most likely stole. It’s your typical dysfunctional home, and it irks me, annoys me so much that I feel cockroaches crawling under my skin at the unoriginality of it. I’m just your regular sob story, the kid with the addict parents who gets knocked around from time to time. I don’t want a life where everything is cotton-candy-dandy but I don’t want my life of squalor either. I just want something different, something extraordinary.
It strikes me how very contradictory I am, saying I want others to be like me, and then saying I want to be different. The truth is, I want everything, but I don’t care enough to take it for myself. I just don’t care.
The wind whistles lightly in my ear, the melody of a happier person’s life, of a small child picking daffodils. I picture shiny shoes and hair tied in ribbons and I smile in a vicious attempt at happiness while I think about how that person will one day lose everything, because everyone loses everything eventually. I just lost everything a lot sooner than most people. The figurative heart was created to be trampled on and pressured and tortured to its core and it’s futile trying to resist.
*
One day, my mother shoves me in our freezer. It’s one of those huge deep freezer things, and ours is empty so there’s lots of room. She puts me in there and she closes the door and I nonchalantly wonder if I’ll ever get out of there. A mere four minutes later, one of my brothers wrenches the door open and pulls me out.
“Lucky I was hungry,” he grunts. We both no he didn’t go in the freezer because he was hungry; he may never do much for this family, but everyone knows we don’t keep food in there. I think I should probably be grateful towards him, for finally caring, but find myself wondering what it would’ve been like, to lie in there slowly freezing, slowly, slowly dying. My brother shoves me and says, “Go take a shower and warm up, you moron,” but instead, I go outside in the wind, and let it whip back my long hair.
*
We’re at the dinner table for once, when my father throws a fork at me. “Boy,” he says, and I want to groan at what a trite word that is for someone like him to use. I grit my teeth and think of teacups with flowery patterns and furniture stores with bright orange plastic chairs. “Stop spacing out, boy, and eat this food that your brother prepared all by himself. Ungrateful whelp.” I drag my eyes away from my thoughts of sparkly pens and vibrant maracas to stare distastefully at the meal. It’s true, I think, but don’t dare say. My brother is fairly talented at preparing take out. All by himself.
I paste a china doll smile on my face and swallow a mouthful of soggy noodles and imagine that I’m really swallowing air, or hollow, hollow wind and it’s filling up my chipmunk cheeks. Later, on my knees in front of the toilet, I think of spattered paint on hard cement and lemonade stands in the sun. As I spew up everything in my stomach, I think of nails painted black with tiny white spiders.
*
Some days I actually go to school, and I sit there and wonder why I even bother. Other students give me a wide berth and try to pretend that I’m not there. Teachers shove missed work in my hands and ask me how I am, but they never follow through.
“And how are you today, love? You feeling okay now?”
“Fine.”
And that’s that. Because people don’t really want to hear the truth, they want to hear what will cause them the least amount of trouble and getting involved with helping me, that’s too much effort. In art, we’re told to paint a picture of time, and one girl, she paints a dead person and one person paints a plant. One particularly profound guy paints a clock. I, I paint a world with a magenta sky and vermillion ground, with pretty little wisteria clouds. My teacher asks me what that has to do with time, a little uncertainly, and the class stares at me, unashamedly. “In time,” I say, “This is what the world will look like.”
The teacher stares at me worriedly and the kids stare at me like I’m full-blown insane, and no one realizes it’s a joke, that I don’t actually believe the world is going to change colour. I wasn’t doing the assignment, I was doing my own assignment. I was drawing the world I’d like to live in, and because it’s a topsy-turvy world , it has no time. Time is just another limit on freedom, and I have enough of those.
Later, it strikes me that my painting almost appears as though bathed in blood.
*
I return home one night to find my mother gone and my father dead.
“She killed him,” my brother says in astonishment. “She… I mean, I always thought he’d kill her, but she just… and… out of nowhere, just stabbed him, and oh dear god, I was right there, and what am I supposed to do?”
Sometime between now and the last time I saw him, my brother has acquired emotions. It’s strange, how death can do that to people.
“And she bailed?” I say, indifferently. Apparently it doesn’t affect me. My brother nods, and I think he’s in shock, but can’t bring myself to do anything and I hate that, because I feel so hypocritical. I’m always accusing everyone of not caring, when I’m the one who cares the least.
“Think of nicer stuff,” I say to him, finally. “Like light reflecting off a CD, or lines on a ruler.” But suddenly, that’s not right, because there are a million ways that could go wrong, and those ways are happening in my head right now. The light is blinding me, reflecting into my eyes, and those lines on that ruler, they’re too constricting. I’m not making any sense, even to myself, but somehow even the pretty things aren’t pretty now, they all have faults.
Maybe death does have an effect on me, too, though I didn’t think it could settle in this quickly. I look outside, and it’s a calm day, leaves on the trees perfectly still.
“You’re not taking this seriously!” my brother screams, unaware of my inner turmoil. “You never take anything seriously! It’s like you’re never here! I mean, physically, you’re always off somewhere, thinking I don’t notice, for weeks at a time, and mentally you’re gone! At least when you leave the house, I know you’re coming back… But when you go off into your mind, man, I’m just not so sure.”
My brother looks so scared and I can’t even say anything to him, because every time I think I’ve got something to say in reply to that, it gets swallowed up by my other thoughts, thoughts of sword hilts encrusted with rubies. My pretty thoughts are tainted too now, though, for as I watch, in my mind’s eye, I see the sword cutting pretty patterns and it looks so nice, and I want to say something to my brother because he’s breaking down, but I just can’t concentrate.
“I apologize,” I manage, somehow, sounding horribly fake. “I have to go talk to my wind friends.”
And I can’t believe I just said that, because now he’s looking at me like I’m a nut job, and that’s almost as bad as his concerned look. I wish my mouth would shut up, but it’s not me talking, it’s never been, the wind is using my body for its own conversation. “They like me, you see. They’ve never seen me, so they don’t know how disgusting I am, how vile. They just hear my voice and I hear their voices and you wouldn’t understand, because you don’t get the wind like I do.”
My brother is backing away, and I can’t stop him because I won’t stop rambling on about the wind. “I’m just going to call an ambulance, okay? They can help you, I think you’re in shock finding dad like – no screw that, you’ve always been like this, haven’t you? And I can hardly call an ambulance, the police will take us in.”
I’m no longer paying attention to his distracted speech, focusing my mind instead on the sounds of insects feathery footsteps on the walls. I can hear them and they’re so close, and I wonder if they’d be my frie –
My brother slaps me, making my head snap around. When I look back, he’s shouting, “Listen, okay, we’ll manage without you. Just get out, okay, get out of here. You’re crazy, and I’d like to help you man, I really would, but I just can’t, so you need to leave and find your own way.” For some reason, my brain isn’t getting what those words mean; it hears them, but it can’t translate them into what ever language the wind speaks, whatever language it is that I speak.
Him pushing me out though, it’s not that hard to get. He looks so hurt as I leave, and my other brother isn’t even there yet, doesn’t even know, and I want to make my brother feel better, but the wind is calling and there’s nothing I can do. I have a new family now, and somehow they just can’t exist only in my imagination.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I hope it’s somewhere that has skies in shades of pink. I hope it’s somewhere that’s as flipped around upside down as I am.