Silence

I still remember the days afterwords, when I slowly rubbed my neck, just to feel the light sting of the bruises. I felt like an animal in a cage. Yes, that's a cliche metaphor but nobody ever mentions the reality of it. I felt as if everything I said to anyone was nonsense. Like an annoying dog yapping to be taken out of the cage. Think for a moment. All you can be sure of is that removing the dog from the cage may make it stop momentarily, but you can't ever be completely sure that was all it wanted. Maybe it wanted to be held, loved, and cared for, in a way that it may have felt it longed for. The yapping gets your attention, so you move it out of the cage. Yet it begins yapping outside of the cage so you put it back in. This process repeats itself because neither the dog nor the owner know how to communicate. Sadly, rather than attempting to look deeper to find a real cause for the cries, most owners would simply say that the dog is never happy and become frustrated. So yes, in the most cliche way, I felt like a caged animal. For a few years I fought relentlessly to find a way to tell my parents, my friends, or anybody who would listen really, what I wanted. That I was sad, and my heart was definitely missing something. I couldn't communicate in a way they understood easy enough. They became frustrated and the process repeated until I gave up on trying to get help. I became silent about my emotions and they mostly blamed it on me. I felt like I was drowning. Not simply just not swimming and drowning because of lack of effort, but drowning because the people I loved most helped me tie weights to my legs and promised me that as soon as I got in the water that they'd help me float. With all my confidence I jumped into the water and I realized I was sinking. I was flailing around frantically and gasping for breath as I felt the weights pulling me lower and lower. I screamed to the ones I trusted, and they would scream back "just swim" I didn't know how to swim. "I've swum before and it worked for me." I still don't know how to swim. I began to fight the water and fend for myself, ya know, try to forge my own path. The one thing I discovered was, nobody can do it alone. Silence gets to me. I can't deal with being invisible in my own home and among mindless drones around me. Everybody has a breaking point and well, it seems that mine came sooner than it should have. There is only so much stress you can put on the human mind. I dealt with the silence for a year. What I've noticed is, silence is the loudest scream when you come down to it. Words, they only have an inch or two of worth, but silence is the only thing that while existent, is in itself, non-existent. If I asked you to close your eyes, and handed you a piece of yellow paper and said that it was red, you would believe me because you have no reason not to. Where as if I handed you a sheet of yellow paper and said nothing, you would open your eyes observe that it was in fact yellow, and the silence didn't attempt to cover anything. It's almost like it's asking you "What color am I?" Silence is the absence of words, the absence of meaning, therefore putting you in a position where you should ask yourself what's really going on in a specific situation. Words give you temporary relief. They give you a sense of really knowing what's going on even though you may be speeding towards hell. You hear that you are safe and you look no further because someone has confirmed your safety. If somebody said nothing you should open your eyes and see what the hell is really going on. Silence has been true, is true, and will always be true, because how can an "absence" be false? Yet even though all of these things prove to be true, nobody looks past the silence because it's easier to believe everybody is happy than to actually put forth the effort to change things. Just because I'm not complaining doesn't mean I'm not sad. I'd had enough. I was tired of never wanting to do things in fear of repetition. I was tired of being silent. So I hung myself. I blacked out and all I know is I woke up on the floor with a pounding headache and my mother screaming at me and asking why. I said nothing for the longest time. And when I finally spoke, I realized another thing, the truth, to those who choose not to believe it, in fear of their own guilt, is apparently no longer valid. "Why did you do this Sophia?" "I would've talked to you I could've helped you." My mother was shaking as she spoke. I don't remember the exact words I said to her but what I do remember of it, sounded a lot like yapping to her clearly. She told me that she'd tried to help me before and that she had no idea I was still upset. She said she tried all she could and then she left my room. I dragged myself out of my closet and laid in my bed and etched another tally on my bed post. "Four." I whispered to myself. She came back into my room and told me to get ready to leave. I threw on a hoodie and pulled up some baggy sweatpants and she rushed me out the door and into the car. I fell asleep and when I woke up I was sitting in a parking lot. I remember that I choked a bit when I read the sign that said "Lavender Mental Health Care Center." My mother yelled at me to get out of the car and we went inside and she checked me in. There's not much to mention about it, other than it took much longer than I would've appreciated. When I got into the unit the other kids stared at me like I was new prey. The orderlies checked me for scars, cuts, piercings, tattoos, bruises, and anything really identifiable. Shortly after they put me in the common room with the others, and they asked me how I got there. I told them my story and they told me theirs. We really got more meaningful help from each other than any of those therapists ever gave us. We identified with one another and made connections on an intellectual level that before then, I'd never been able to make with anyone. They inspired me to keep fighting and although I have, I've been falling down more and more recently. I've been silent and I'm starting to want to give up because I'm so tired of being ignored. Instead of killing myself and escaping, I figured, why not write it down and let this be my breach of silence. I will let this be my note to the other quiet ones, that although it seems like no ones cares enough to notice you, you should keep fighting because if you silence yourself permanently, you aren't changing the circumstances, and you're ending any possibility of ever being heard. Don't give up. It only makes the silence permanent, and untreatable.