It isn't that I can't speak, it's just that the only person I could talk to is well... dead. Kicking the can. Pushing up daisies. All those sad euphemisms have led me to not talking. And it's not the worst thing in the world. I can still do regular human things. I'm not totally useless. It's just that some people think that once you've lost your voice, it gives them a right to treat you differently like an alien from a different planet.
And because I have wholeheartedly refused to learn sign language and to go to a deaf or mute school, my mother found it quite suiting to just put me into a regular high school in my junior year. It's not like I hadn't blatantly showed my disinterest in those sign language classes. All I remember is how I spelled my name. J-O-J-O
And it's been hard losing the one person you can talk to so it's quite lonely in that head of mine. The only way I could express it was art. Before it was just sad, messed up doodles in school notebooks and then it morphed into something else. It came from a trip to New York during Spring Break of my junior year...
Our small family of three (my mom, my younger brother, and me) travelled to the Empire State Building and the view up there was spectacular. The sky was clear and I saw every inch of New York. The yellow taxi cars stood out against the plain gray buildings. I could hear traffic all the way up from the top floor. I imagined the creator of all of those buildings and how each one was created separate and put together in one huge city, it meshed perfectly. And I wanted to be just like those creators.
My family noticed the change in me when my grades picked up (I needed at least a 3.0 to take Architecture) and my attendance increasing (Architecture was in the mornings). I wasn't going to be the drop out my mother stressed to my aunt Susie on their late night phone chats. And I was totally determined to do something with my life.
Senior year was popping up and I needed some amazing piece for my portfolio. My grades weren't a shoe in for Cornell; I barely averaged my required 3.0 by my last semester of junior year. No extra curriculars to speak of because I couldn't speak and that deemed me "unable to communicate with the rest of the team" and nothing else interested me at school.
So one school day my brother Mikey came up to me totally enthused about this new game he downloaded from his friend's recommendation. It was called Minecraft. And after he showed me a few of the screenshots of the amazing art on the site, I got the amazing idea to create one of my portfolio pieces on there. After a long text talk with my mom (yes, that's how we communicated), she agreed and in turn she had a real live talk with my architecture teacher. I got the thumbs up for "being unique and totally out of the box" and I started my first piece.
It was a mash of an adventure map of a dystopian society that can't communicate properly set in the city of New York (my first inspiration) and a lot of amazing architecture. The plot was based loosely on my experiences from the previous year. It took me the bulk of summer break after junior year to complete and then I let my brother try it out. After all the kinks were worked out, I set it aside and started on other pieces.
I really didn't think it'd be that big of a hit. But of course, I didn't think I'd fall in love with a Youtube star either.
