Noumena: Sophie and Oliver

Chapter One: Voices

I walked out into the strong dusty breeze from the automatic doors of the psychology building. They made an electronic hum and loud clunk as they closed behind me. My long dark brown hair whipped in the direction of my next class. I was very late. The locks irritated my face so I tamed them into a loose pony tail and scanned the surrounding courtyard. It was uncommonly windy for this time of year. A typical spring day in Armidale consisted of sunshine and cool breezes. Today the university campus was in a Sepia coloured shadow due to a thick dust cloud that had been stirred up by a cold front. Maple tree branches cracked under wind gusts and I dodged falling debris. I crossed my arms protecting my body from the penetrating winds that made my entire body produce goose bumps. I remembered I’d brought a fur-lined hoody and shrugged it on.

I began to run, not out of eagerness to get to class but so I could warm up. My bag jiggled uncomfortably out of rhythm with my body while I ran the five hundred metres to the three story Arts building. I passed the newly refurbished classrooms to the oldest part of the building. I arrived gasping like a fish and I tried to quieten the noise of my breath rushing in and out of my mouth. I quickly apologised to my professor after his appraising yet indifferent glance.

“Sorry” I said to the whole classroom.

“Have a seat Miss Night” he responded nonchalantly. The eyes of four other people in the classroom dropped from me back to scribbling down notes – or at least appearing to do so. I thought I heard one of them murmur something.

The familiar dark, musty, cramped room, settled in on me as I caught my breath. A florescent bulb was slowly dying and cast an annoying flicker of light on my notepad. I considered a trip to the hardware store to fix it. Eventually a hammer would do. The old industrial carpet ponged with the smell of damp.

It made sense that philosophy was delivered in the oldest section of the building, a kind of congruence arose between the professor’s quoting from the works of Plato and Socrates and the room’s decaying state. I heard someone say something again, I looked up, but everyone was writing ferociously as the professor prattled on.

Stupid imagination. My brain was always trying to make reality more exciting than it was. My mother had warned me about living inside my head. “All that thinking can’t be good for you, it’s not normal”, she would say followed by “Isn’t that right, Robert?” Father never participated in the nit-picky discourse. Not because he didn’t agree, but because he rarely spoke. He preferred grunts, snorts and hums. These days Mum had given up on trying to change me and settled for emitting heavy sighs and expressions of disappointment instead. Parents always have a way of making you feel guilty even when you’ve done nothing wrong.

From the age of twelve onwards I’d kept my thoughts to myself since my ideas and imaginings only seemed to annoy Mum. Lately, I was beginning to believe that all those years of ignoring her had done something to me. Odd things had started to occur, nothing I could put my finger on, just little things here and there. Seeing glimmers of something out the corner of my eye, catching the whispers of a voice when no-one had spoken – that kind of thing. I think some this was due to watching too many sci-fi movies and reading too much fantasy. I always related to Neo in the movie The Matrix, feeling like there was something more to this reality, something else. Cliché, I know. But I just couldn’t shake it.

Usually I pushed the thoughts aside and viewed them as a symptom of my overactive imagination, but lately it was getting worse. Maybe it was the monotony of being in my last year of uni, maybe I was finally sick of study, sick of learning, but all of those explanations seemed unlikely. Yes, I was the eager student, the keen learner, the clichéd nerdy chick. And when it came to philosophy, I was in love.

I was lucky to be here studying philosophy; my mother had accepted psychology as my major but had thrown me a look of utter betrayal when I’d mentioned electing philosophy units. A committed church goer my mothers idea of literature was handbook of God, The Bible. She didn’t try to force the idea of God on me, but she always persisted in trying to turn me into some sort of blonde Stepford wife. It seemed sort of strange to her that a girl let alone a young girl would be so interested in people like Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. She was always trying to snuff my interests, bringing me magazines, taking me shopping, encouraging me to be like my best friend Lara. I adored Lara but we were opposites.