The Wordless Symphony {Andy Biersack}

2 - We Stitch These Wounds

    We were fast friends, faster than anyone I had ever met and before I could count to three, we had started to divulge our most deep dark secrets to one another.  Granted I was usually an open book with people because I didn’t give a rat’s hairy ass what they thought of me but with him it was different.  I didn’t want him to look down on me for some odd reason and yet he was able to tell me these awful things that had happened to him.  He found himself beat up on a weekly basis because he stood up for kids that were the victims of crimes.  Sometimes he won the fights and sometimes he didn’t but he never stopped trying to help people.  I could see in his eyes that when he spoke so fiercely about protecting people that he had been hurt at some point in his life though it was a surprise to find his family in tact, near perfect.

    I told him about my mother, the most precious memories of her and how I had gone through a streak of depression when I was thirteen.  Now that I was seventeen, I felt stupid about the things I had done and the people I had unintentionally hurt but was proud of where I was headed now.  My life had done a complete one-eighty and I was applying to schools with the most prestigious pre-medical programs.  I didn’t give up even in my darkest moments, leaning on my dad when I could and writing when I couldn’t.  I tried everything from singing, to writing, to volunteering at a hospital.  My dad finally ended up pulling the car over one day when there was a dog stranded on the side of the road.  He was a pit bull mix, an animal that was frightened yet willing to let us help him.  I named her Bulletproof, Bullet for short.  She gave me hope for better days no matter how crappy my afternoon had been.

    When I told him about that, he smiled and make my heart soar, though there was a tinge of sadness that hung around him like a dark cloud and it was on a constant basis. 

    He wrote music, beautiful lyrics from the heart and had started a band with a couple of people he was friends with.  I hadn’t had the pleasure of hearing them yet, but he had sang for me one day when I had begged.  His voice was so melodic, so harmonious and bass that I was nearly brought to tears at the sound.  The only catch was that his band members were from other schools and only practiced when they could get a ride to one of their parent‘s places.  Andy said his dream was to change the world, to help people and to make them want to help others.  To do this, he planned on going to college for a little while to learn all he could about music and then wanted to branch out, just go for the dream of fame as though taking a leap of faith.  It wasn’t that he was naïve enough to believe that it was easy, but he was determined enough to take that risk in order to bring his dream into reality.

    And as each word left his lips, I realized I was slowly falling in love with him.

    “Hey,” his deep voice called suddenly, resonating in my core like the deep strum of a bass guitar.  I jumped slightly in my skin before I watched as his figure slowly, gracefully sat next to me.  I was leaned up against the far wall of our cafeteria’s stage, the ghetto representation of the stage they used to use before the theater arts program had enough money to build a real one anyway.  I liked to sit back here while I ate lunch so that I could be alone, maybe read a book in my solitude but lately Andy had been meeting me here every day for the past month and a half.

    I smiled at him and replied with a low, “Hey.”    

    “What’s up Nyx?” he questioned, causing my grin to spread further at the nickname he had dubbed on me.  He said ‘Iris’ was too clean and cut, to prim and proper for a girl like me so he used my middle name to come up with Nyx.  He told me she was the Greek goddess that was the mother of the night, the beautiful creature that hid in the shadows.  I had blushed at the idea that he could possibly think of me in that manner but had accepted the name with poise.