Numb

Just a little something I wrote on a day I was feeling a little empty. It may not make too much sense, considering I used a lot of figurative language to express emotions, but I hope you enjoy it anyway :).

Nowadays--bubbling into the age of teenage-hood--the boy found that he had started to hate a lot of things, but none so much as he hated time itself. He hated the things it did to him. The way it morphed his sweet, young, childhood self and turned it into... this. This empty shell of a thing. A creature of filth and imperfections, a blackened heart barely beating in a palace of broken bones. So long ago, before time has stolen it, he knew he had held an innocence to him. A childlike joy that stemmed from his soul, released itself in little bursts of carefree laughter. He remembered--though the memories were quite foggy in his brain--running around with the other children in the happy, little park right in the midst of the neighborhood. Nothing had ever seemed to bother him back then. And those that did were forgotten in mere moments. He was just always so happy when he was a little boy. His mind and emotions so limited that it was as if he weren’t even capable of feeling anything else. Happiness. That was all he knew, and he had liked it that way.

He wondered where those days went. Those days when he didn’t struggle to wake himself up in the morning, but had instead popped out of bed like a cork in a bottle. Those days when he didn’t hate himself, didn’t hate everybody around him, and instead saw them all through those lovely, rose-colored glasses. Those days when he was sure of things. Sure of who he was, and where he was, and what he was meant to be. He just didn’t know how it had all disappeared. Or where it had all gone. All he knew was that it was never coming back.

But, if there was one thing in the entire world that he was sure of, it was that he was not in pain. Not at all. He refused to use that word to describe himself. It just didn’t fit. It just wasn’t right.

Pain was for the starving children in Africa. The one’s who lived in shack houses, and drank dirty, brown water to avoid dehydration. That was not him.

Pain was for the boy who watched his own father lowered down into his grave. For the girl who rubbed her hand over her shiny, naked head as she fought off the disease that was killing her from the inside out. That was not him.

Pain was for the child who held a knife to his own wrist, trying to escape from the cruel words of his peers. For the teenager who looked at her shrunken, sickly stomach and saw in its place a fat, distorted tummy that did not exist. That was not him.

Pain was for the unloved, the lonely. The abused and the beaten. The scarred and the broken and the afraid.

Not for him.

He was no struggling child. No hero overcoming the world’s harshest obstacles. He knew, deep down, that he did not deserve to call himself that. Look at him. Look at all he had. At the very least, he should have been happy. So why wasn’t he?

His own emptiness shamed him.

It was pointless, really. He had no reason to feel this way. Had no reason to be sulking, no reason to be wallowing in self-pity like a child who didn’t get the candy bar he wanted. But here he was, regardless. And this was how he felt.

He knew it wasn’t pain, it couldn’t be. It was something else.

He was only numb.

Numb. Even the word sounded dead on his lips. He hated it, and yet it seemed to be the only thing that could describe him. Numb was his new name. Numb was what he was made of.

Everyday, it seemed, he was always going through the same routine. He walked to school, and walked home. Walked to school, walked home. Walked to school, walked home. It was a sickening cycle. Pointless, meaningless, empty. It made him feel so much like nothing. He didn’t understand why he was the only one.

He’d talk to his friends at lunch or in the hallways, and always they would be in such horribly cheery moods. They’d tell him jokes and he’d laugh even if he didn’t find them very funny. He’d laugh until his own voice burned him from the inside out, and he’d grin at them until his own smile turned to dust. His smile turned to dust.

And he was so tired, now. So tired. Tired of walking even when he knew that he was going nowhere. Tired of laughing even when he knew that the world wasn’t funny. Tired of smiling even when he knew he wasn’t happy.

Around and around and around he walked in a circle. Nothing bad was happening, so he wasn’t in any pain. But nothing good was happening, either. Nothing. And he’d just walked for so long, done nothing and felt nothing for so many tireless days, that his legs went numb and so did his heart. He was just so sick of waiting for nothing. Waiting and waiting and waiting and not knowing what for.

It made him empty. Just completely empty. And he didn’t know how to change that.

For the first time in his life, he really understood why people committed suicide. It somehow started making sense to him. When he was younger, the world had just been so bright and wonderful, and so was he. The idea of ending his own life had just been so terrifying, and it made no sense to him at all. But now the magic had been sucked away, and he was living in a vacuum of empty space. He thought about being dead and it mortified him how he was no longer so afraid of it. He was still a child, really. Still just a boy. Children were supposed to be afraid of the creature of death. But he wasn’t. It seemed, almost, like it would be a relief. That he could finally stop the endless stream of empty thoughts that plagued his mind, stop being filled with all the nothing, and just become part of the nothing. Because, he knew, that in death there was no worry. There was no anything. He wouldn’t have to feel numb anymore, because he would just melt away. And you can’t feel numb if you don’t exist. He was sure of that.

But, even as he ached for an end, he knew he would never do it. Because it took real pain for someone to force themselves against their natural will to survive. Life had to be an actual living hell for someone to even dare to go that far. He simply wasn’t there yet. He would never be there. Because he was only numb. Emotionless. And that just wasn’t enough of a motivation. Sure, he had no reason to live, but he had no reason to die, either. He simply didn’t care anymore.

In his hopeless attempt to fill the void, he began to do things he wasn’t supposed to. Things he knew right from the beginning that he would end up regretting. His mother and father had trusted him to be smart, and he really was, but maybe that was the problem to begin with. He thought too much. And all the voices in his mind were what drove him crazy, were what left his skin rattling from the inside out and chased away all his once so beautiful feelings. He just wanted to find something to make the voices stop. To make them go away forever.

The first time he had put the white stick in his mouth and sucked it in, he had felt like he was dying. The smoke swam inside of him, found its way inside his void and tugged it tight. He couldn’t breathe and he coughed and coughed until he was vomiting all over his jeans. His friends had laughed and he had had to walk home all alone that night, still wheezing like a wounded animal. Yet, the very next day, he had done it again. Because even on his way home last night, covered in his own bile and acid, he had realized that, if only for a moment, his void had been closed. And he relished that feeling of fullness that it gave him. And he refused to let it go.

For a long time, he continued to use the smoke to fill his void. He’d puff one a day. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. More and more and more each chance he got. Because, it seemed to him, that every time he puffed, after his chest became full and the void went tight, it would release again after only a moment. And after each release, his void got just a little bit looser. Bigger and wider and emptier. And it took him more and more smoke to fill it up again. More and more. And yet, he was only getting worse and worse. But he didn’t care. He just needed to make it go away.

A year after he took his first puff, he decided to try and gulp down some of that amber liquid that all his friends seemed to love so much. It tasted rancid on his tongue, and it burned his throat all the way down, and yet he found himself loving it. Because it, too, would go inside his void and fill it up. But unlike the smoke, it wouldn’t leave him after only a moment. It would stay with him.

That was, until the next day. He started to wake up every morning with his head spinning and his breath sour. He’d moan and his brain would pound, and his void seemed to take up his entire being. He was just one big nothing now, lazing on a bed, wishing God would just kill him already. He’d always get another swig of booze as soon as he could, because he found that if he wasn’t drunk, he was miserable. And he was empty. And he just couldn’t take that anymore.

He only got worse and worse. He kept trying new things, bad things, to get rid of his void. But in the end, they only seemed to make it bigger. And he barely existed now. He was a black hole. Sucking things in and in and in and never letting anything back out again. He missed the days when a single smoke would make him vomit. But now there was no going back. He had strayed too far, and he’d have to live with that.

Numb. Numb. Numb. Numb. Numb. He was just so numb. He hadn’t felt things in so long. He had forgotten what it was like to be human. His void had overpassed him. Gone farther than the boundaries of his being, until the point where who he used to be had been swallowed up by its entirety. But at least the voices were gone, now. The poison he fed himself had killed them.

He didn’t know the exact moment when he realized what he had become. All he could recall was that one second he had been walking home from school, two ounces of cocaine tucked away safely in his jeans pocket, and the next he had been sprawled on the ground, crying like a baby. Just lying there, on the concrete sidewalk, bawling his eyes out for all to see. But he didn’t care. Not anymore. Because he had been emotionless for too long now. Those tears had been waiting to fall for so many years. He realized now that he was not numb anymore. He was in pain. But even that was an improvement.

It felt like he had been lying there, motionless, for hours. But it was worth it. He knew it was, because that was when he heard the sound. Soft and distant and barely even noticeable. But he heard it all the same.

He looked up and saw a little girl. Dark hair trailing down her back, eyes pale and unseeing. She was sitting a few houses away, on a little wooden porch, strumming a guitar. Just a simple, little guitar. And she wasn’t even that good at it. She kept making mistakes, pausing to fix her fingering and even going out of tune completely. But the boy had been mesmerized. His eyes still wet from tears, he had lifted his head and watched her, mouth agape and tasting like blood. Her music was so flawed, and yet it was so perfect. It bounced inside his head, seeping into his brain like it was some sort of sponge and filling him with a strange, unexpected sort of giddiness that was completely new to him. It brought a welcome smile to him lips.

For a moment, as he had gazed at her sitting there, her fingers dancing on the strings like they were made for it, the void inside of him began to do something funny. It did not fill up, not what the drugs made it do. Instead it just began to shrink down a little. Become a tad smaller. Just a tad, but that was enough. The tiny piece of him that used to be nothing, became something. It became music. And from then on he was in love. He needed nothing more.

He stole his first guitar from a thrift shop. He knew he could have asked his parents for the money, but they didn’t trust him anymore. He had lost their sacred love long ago. So as he had brought his new treasure behind his house, sat it on his lap, and strummed his first, out-of-tune note, all he knew was that for the first time in a long, long time, he had found something good. Something that would not only fill his void, but erase it completely. And he knew in that moment, that he would never let it go.

And so he played. He played when he was feeling sad or angry, or even just numb, and every time he finished a song he found that those feelings had been washed away through the music and replaced with something better. He played in the darkness until it had become light, and he played in the rain until the sun would come out shining. He played and played and forgot all about the bag of cocaine in his jeans pocket, and about the burning amber liquid, and about the choking smoke. All that he remembered when he played was the music.

For the first time in his entire life, he had direction. He knew now that that was all he had been missing to begin with. It had taken so long, but finally he had found his way out of that endless cycle. He could see his path now, and it was shining so bright and new that it left his speechless. So as he walked down that road, his legs no longer so tired and numb, he knew that he was really flying. And instead of using words, he let his guitar speak for him. And he let this one good thing chase away all of the bad things.

And for the first time in a long, long time, he was not numb.