Muffled - True Story

i.

—

to the strongest man I know who survived a demon in his ear.

—

muffled.

         Sitting up straight on my bed, I try to comprehend the feeling.

         It's so soft and fuzzy that my brain detects a lack of clarity; the perfect explanation would be of a mosaic. The blurred, soft pieces of a mosaic blended to an utmost degree; you can feel it, but can't quite catch it. On the other hand, it's like the eye of a needle; shiny and as prominent as anything but as piercing as a million embers of a died out fire coursing through your ears and out into nowhere.

          Even if I have wrapped my naive mind around the undeniable fact that it's only and only there for me to feel pain, it's still hard as anything can be to keep my mouth shut when I want to ask anyone and everyone around me, "Do you hear it too?"

          Most diseases start out slow — in a gradient — and become more and more prominent with time but not this one. It felt it like a smack and very thing became numb; not that 'not feeling any pain numb' though, I'm not that fortunate, but that 'can feel every pain in the world numb' instead.

          And let me tell you, it's hard.

          It's hard more than anything in the world when a soul's only escape — it's biggest crave — is solitude but when it's finally given the presence of his own broken self, it kills it's own senses in a snap.

          It lulled my mind to a degree I didn't even know was possible.

          That constant ringing — that damn sound was piercing than anything anyone could ever imagine — made it hard for me to sleep. Heck I couldn't even dream with it being a constant intruder all the time.

          Nights were the worst. The thick void settled in within the town and I fell with it.

          Panic struck to me at nights. When the town fell asleep and ma and dad felt like going to bed, it fueled that damned thing even more.

          And to make matters worse, Dad wasn't really one of the supporting ones.

         "You're accursed." He spat and my eyes flew to him in despair. Was I really?

         You know, the sad thing is that half of the time, I would look around myself and choose a wall to punch. Punch my fist so hard into it in hopes of the pain overcoming the one in my ear. It'd even work sometimes, just for a microsecond, and then it was back again. And the other half of the time, I'd think on Dad's words.

          Tears pricked my eyes twenty-four seven.

          I wanted to crawl inside a tiny little cave, far far away in the placid aura of the forest but even then, that voice in the back of my head told me it wouldn't be able to stop it.

          And I bet it would not have lowered, even a decibel, of that nerve wrecking whistle.

          Th—that thing was... powerful. It was fireproof and it killed me to admit it.

          It was the ventriloquist to my naive puppet.

          Time molded itself into an agonizing whole year and me, into a sleep deprived, close-to-death, wandering soul who'd be on the search to find small crevices in the house to curl myself into.

          The frustrating thing about Tinnitus was that you wouldn't notice when it wasn't actually there. You'd keep your ear over the tense, silent void and you'd realize it wasn't there for a moment.

         And then you feel it slowly come back.

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