SLEEPSONG (BoyxBoy)✔️

Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two

There are moments in time when you feel like everything around you simply goes away. 

These are moments when the feel of the clothes against your skin disappears, the voices of the people around you fade, and the ground seems to fall out from beneath your feet. Instead of the press of external sensation, your entire being focuses in on the beat of your heart and the rasp of air in your lungs. Your limbs tingle. Your mouth goes dry. 

The air buffets at your eardrums and eyeballs but you can't so much as blink to clear the cobwebs because everything inside of you—every doubt, every assurance, every insecurity, every confidence—becomes sucked into a vacuum of pure nothing. 

This sense of nothing and of emptiness is the embodiment of the deepest kind of shock, the kind of shock you only feel when someone voices a possibility so outlandish, so unexpected, you can do nothing more than merely stare in blank, open, unfeeling confusion.

The first time I experienced a shock that deep, I'd been very, very young, four or five, perhaps, or sometime in between... a little while before my father had run off, that much I could remember. It had been my first day of school as well as my first exposure to the cruelty of other children. 

Back then, my mother had escorted me into my classroom by the hand, and I remember feeling excited by the colorful posters on the walls and the toys in their ordered boxes, and also for our teacher, who had been young and chubby and kind. 

I'd been the first one there that morning, so the teacher had showed me to my desk herself, and when Mom had said she was leaving I'd barely felt homesick for her at all. I'd been too distracted by my new school supplies, my teacher, and the sensation of anticipatory happiness at the thought of making friends for the very first time. 

After all, both my teacher and my mother had expressed the idea that as soon as other the kids arrived, we'd all be as thick as thieves. 

Of course, they'd been wrong.

I'd been abnormally pale, dressed all in black high SPF sun-proofed clothing from head to toe with large sunglasses and a big, goofy sunhat. Back then, I'd also had trouble breathing properly due to my underdeveloped lung, so I'd had mechanical tubes in my nose to help with that, and for my heart problems, I'd been hooked up to a transportable machine. 

The hope had been that my poor health conditions would even themselves out as I grew older. I'd already had twelve surgeries on my lung before the age of five, and while the end result had been a positive one in my case, back then, when I'd still been suffering the most, it had been very hard for people not to see me as something other than a symbol of negativity. 

I'd stood out, and not in a good way.

Overlooking my appearance and apparel had been like trying to overlook a person's nose. It couldn't be done, it'd been apparent and literally impossible to hide. 

From almost the minute my classmates had started to arrive, I'd known that something wasn't right. Each child I'd seen had looked not at me, but at my clothes, and the huge hat, and the big sunglasses, and the tubes, and the wires, and the heart machine—their eyes had lingered on it all before they'd been distracted by a parent or our teacher, who'd taken their hands and led them to their seats, all while the kids shot me glances over their shoulders. 

I'd smiled at them to show I was friendly, but few were able to look away from the rest.

I'd never faced that before. 

Though I hadn't known it at the time, I'd later recalled how my mother and father hardly ever let me play with other kids before kindergarten. Going out in public, I'd always been cloistered in their sheltering presence and when people had stared they'd distracted me, turned my attention in another direction... but that morning at school, I hadn't had anyone to perform that service.