Marching in the Dark

Chapter Two

My parents arrive the next morning and take me home.

I spend the day cleaning my room. The smallest messes are risky now; that pile of books in the middle of the floor, that pile of shoes by the door. I can’t see them anymore, and they trip me up.

I start by simply picking things up, but I quickly find that it’s very difficult to find things that way. Eventually, I find that if I use my new cane, I can locate objects on the floor and put them away.

By lunchtime, though, there is nothing left. I’ve cleaned my entire room, and everything is either where I’ll be able to find it again, or somewhere in plain sight so I could bring someone else in to find it for me. I have nothing left to do; all of my favorite activities are impossible now. I can’t read. I can’t get on my computer. It occurs to me at one point to try texting one of my friends, even if they are at school, but then I realize that I can’t. I’m not even sure if I could use my phone at all anymore. I’d have to memorize every number, because there was no way I would be able to find them in the contacts list.

The difficulties keep on coming. During lunch, I find how difficult it is to eat when you can’t see your plate. Multiple times, I reach forward to get a chip, or pick up my sandwich, and completely miss the plate. I eventually pick it up with one hand so that I am sure where it is at all times, but this causes even more problems when I accidentally knock half my chips into the floor.

I’m about ready to bawl again. I can’t even eat properly. How am I going to live? I can barely find the bathroom anymore, and then it takes even longer to locate the toilet, because it would be really embarrassing to land on my butt beside the toilet. I’m lucky we’ve long since trained my brother not to leave the seat up, because I have to share a bathroom with him, and that would not be fun if he left the seat up.

I spend most of the afternoon practicing, even if I can’t see my music. I pick the notes out of my head, from old half-time shows, Christmas concerts, spring concerts, Symphonic band performances, honor bands, anything I can think of. I play dozens, maybe even hundreds of different pieces on my piccolo and my flute, reliving the days when I learned them. Sometimes, I could only remember a few notes. A phrase here, a phrase there, but I’d always been good at “picking out the notes”. I could listen to a piece of music and, after a little tinkering, learn to play it.

I recreated those missing pieces by picking out the notes from how I remembered it was supposed to sound in my head. I played until my head ached, my jaw hurt, and my lips burned. I played until the notes wouldn’t come anymore, until I’d run out of things to play, because there are only so many songs that I’ve played, and fewer still that I remembered. When I finally ran out of things to play, I carefully put my instruments away and curled up on my bed to cry.

It felt good to let all that out. I hadn’t been able to really cry, to really let out all of my feelings and just sob for an hour until I was sure my eyes must be red and swollen, but then, I couldn’t see them, so I couldn’t be entirely sure. Then I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, and waited.

Not long afterward, I heard a car pull up in the driveway. My family had always jokingly said that I had supersonic hearing, because, even when I was in my room on the second floor with music playing, I could hear a car pull up in the driveway.

I didn’t get up, even though I had a pretty good idea who it was. As it turned out, I was correct; a minute later, I heard several sets of hurried feet coming up the stairs. When the door burst open, my head instinctively moved to face it, even though I still couldn’t see it. A moment later, I was being suffocated by several people trying to hug me at once, and so many voices were talking all at once that I couldn’t make sense of any of them.