Learning

In the waiting room...

As I sit here waiting for the inevitable, the smell of smoke permeates the air. Where it would be crisp and clear smelling, like that of any generic doctor’s office, I’m left finding myself in the situation of that of a sixteen year old’s basement after a “jam session”.

The stench is overpowering.

All consuming in its tobacco tinge and asthma inducing wretchedness. I’ve become distracted by the smell, it fills my nostrils with its sharp tang as the keyboard beneath my fingers creates its soft taps and clacks with every stroke. A child to my right recites a recipe from a cookbook. Entirely focused upon its entirety in a way that I could never accomplish. The way she speaks the words, each step of baking a simple apple pie, makes it seem like the holiest thing on Earth.

It’s puzzling to wonder if I ever did that as a child. Read outloud for the whole world to hear but, in such a manner that everything I said was confident and had an unsurpassable amount of conviction. Now, outgrowing those years, I look back. I  realize I've grown weak. A frail comparison of that child I once was. Confidence no longer thrives within me, rather it cowers in my extremities, threatened by self-loathe and suspicion. There’s a reason I come back to this office every month. I never learn.

Learning was once taught to me as improving from past mistakes. I followed this, up until the point I was consumed by mistakes and not the actual learning. I lost the balance, that level of sanity. I don’t know how to learn any longer. I am a shell of my former child and if one were to hold my soul now against that of only 5 years ago. Well one would shine much brighter.

I’m alone in the office now. Waiting in silence. Silence, now a frightening beast. Something I once would have conquered but, now only brings to light all of the things I could be doing. The past curls itself about my mind. Not a word is spoken in such silence. It doesn't need to be. The silence is broken already. I can not acknowledge it. I cannot speak. I can only allow it to grasp at my vocal chords and twist at the remnants of peaceful thoughts until someone, anyone speaks.

Once they speak, the trance is broken. The demons leave. I never once thought silence could be my most powerful enemy. I learned to talk loudly, speak through the silences, fill my head with nonsense.

Then maybe… There was a chance.

A ringing in my ears has always been a constant companion to combat the silence, however. It is what sings me to sleep in the dark of night. A dull noise barely discernable until the room grows quiet and all that is left is the sound of soft breathing, a softer pulse, and a dull ring. Like hummingbird wings muffled by swaths of cloth, it rests in my inner ear. Occasionally, it grows brilliantly loud.

A deafening beating of wings that makes me duck my head and turn away from the nonexistent. This ringing made me begin to fear the silence, or as close to silence as i can get considering the former. Without it, I would not know that such a thing as eerie quiet. A place where thoughts can manifest themselves into creations that twist and nip at the soul. Bite by bite the silence will eat away.

Silence brought me no comfort but, the companionable ringing began to sound more and more like the empty void i feared. It had become my silence.

I admit that I’ve never quite been right. Normality, along that of society’s standards, has not exactly been a strong suite of mine. At age two, everyday was racked with panic attacks. Rapid hyperventilation, heart beats soaring high, and massive pupils framed my appearance as a toddler. Panic dominated my life for years.

My first memory occuring when I was only two and some odd months old. Sickness was common and was only fueled by amount of stress my body endured. I remember the inability to breathe, choking and wheezing, as I reached for some kind of salvation. I remember my mother rushing into the room as my hands attempted to grip the sides of a plastic bucket. Heaves racked my body and I remembered there violence, the fear I felt as I choked on the mucus and bile in my throat.

Being two years old, the stimuli my body reacted to was not the acknowledgment of death but rather some subconscious ingrained self preservation. It was a creature that made everything vivid yet, speech impossible.

The arms of my mother wrapped around my shivering body and I stared past her with an unseeing gaze. Her hands attempted to soothe my struggling attempts for air but, I continued nonetheless. Panic rising to levels that began to bleed through in some form of empathy to my mother. Her gentleness and caring quickly turned to annoyance and stress, the levels of cortisol almost tangible in the room. Tears mingled with the grey fabric that I clutched in my weak fingers.  

Hands that shook like the fragile atmosphere. No answers, no way to tell. The heaving of my stomach told no predilection to what would pass. In its most primal form, the respiratory system is an involuntary system, functioning and defending itself on its own. In this very way I found myself at the receiving end of misplaced stress and anger.

If by chance, one were to misinterpret this, know that my mother is not a cruel creature. She did not cast me to cold tile to wallow in my own bile out of spite. She did not leave me to grow afraid that she would never return out of scorn, as I made my way beneath the comforting shadow of the table. Gazing up at its height and feeling its natural comfort, the ingrained biological instincts driving me here. She left me there, on the white washed tile with its black grout because of fear.

A thing that plagues my life to this day. In that moment, she was a mother who could not handle the fear of gazing upon a child that she felt she had failed. With this maternal fear, flows stress, as natural as blood through the veins.

I do not blame her for these actions. Fear can drive all of humanity to act on the smallest whim, whether to condemn his fellow man or to bring him back to his feet.

Mother will continue to remain a light on a horizon, that beckons me through storm after storm. A lighthouse just out of reach because if I were to ever find myself in its shadow, I would lose it’s loving gaze.