ip•se•ity |ipˈsēətē|
noun. selfhood - the quality of being oneself; the essential element of individual identity
It had been sunny for months before the Muller's moved in next door to the Scott's. However on they day they arrived, thunder rumbled distantly in the sky. It wasn't often that it rained in the town, so some might have claimed the thunder was a good omen. Others might have found the sky ominous with somber clouds rolling in at an alarming rate. Regardless of what the impending storm meant, Bryan Scott was in a sour mood.
He was definitely not pleased with being coerced downstairs by his older brother to make small talk with their new neighbors, especially since he already knew what the conversation was going to be like and had it memorized like a script:
Following the unwritten rules of well-mannered families, he and his brother would first introduce themselves to the strangers and plaster on fake smiles that didn't quite reach their eyes. The other people would then make a remark about how strikingly similar the two brothers looked. After a few minutes of conversation and polite exchanges, the strangers - like clockwork - would mistakenly praise Bryan's brother for successfully raising Bryan as an extremely courteous son.
It was already agreed upon between the two brothers that neither one of them would ever correct the strangers. In all fairness, they understood where the misconception came from since Bryan was the epitome of a pubescent pre-teen at twelve years old and his brother was at the ripe age of forty-four.
The reason why the Scott brothers decided to never correct the strangers was quite simple: if, in fact they decided to correct the strangers and reveal that they were brothers, the strangers would become skeptical of the thirty-two year age gap. Skepticism leads to prying, and prying leads to questions - questions that Bryan and his brother wouldn't ever dare answer truthfully because, frankly, the truth is sometimes too much to handle.
So the brothers would continue the conversation, going along with the lie that the strangers weaved, and the brothers would remain "normal" in the strangers' eyes.
There is a certain beauty behind the idea of being "normal." People who are "normal" pass through life under the radar. They are the civilians of the world, trying hard to get through life without many troubles. They are the girls who cake on makeup to conform to the impossibly high beauty standards. They are the boys who hit the gym with their buddies even though they couldn't care less about "getting big." They are the people who never get bullied for being different.
However all "normal" people have skeletons in their closet, but it is up to them to decide whether or not to take the plunge from normalness by revealing their demons. They have the choice to embrace their true selves - skeletons and all - even though it may come at the cost of verbal or physical attacks. The people who embrace themselves wholeheartedly are the people referred to as the independents, the revolutionists, the brave.
The Scotts were not brave, and keeping their secret was the price they were more than willing to pay to be "normal." So like the well-mannered 'son' Bryan was supposed to be, he went downstairs obediently to meet his new neighbors and followed the script to a "t".
• • •
It rained for a week after Bryan met the Muller's, and the rain did not seem to have any signs of stopping. During those dreary days, Bryan became acquainted with Josephine Muller. She was a shy girl around Bryan's age, and seemed to walk around in terror.
Every clap of lightening made her tremble like a leaf in the wind, and the thunder made her soul leap out of her body. Bryan felt uncomfortable around her, especially since he did not know how to interact with someone with such a delicate psyche. However, due to an agreement made by his brother and Josephine's parents, she was dropped off at Bryan's house every morning while her parents went to work. He had no choice but to get used to Josephine's eccentric presence.
On one particular afternoon, the hot, summer rain filled the air with thick humidity. Bryan's brother had left the house on an errand, leaving Bryan and Josephine alone in the house.
"Are you two going to be alright alone?" his brother asked before he left.
"Of course! We are twelve years old...I think we can handle ourselves," Bryan rolled his eyes at his brother and looked at Josephine for confirmation. She sat in the corner, staring off into the distance like a ghost was haunting her and showed no signs of acknowledging the statement Bryan had just made.
Bryan's brother sent one last skeptical glance at the two of them before picking up his keys and making his way out of the house. The slam of the front door brought chills up Bryan's spine. It was the first time he was alone with Josephine and admittedly, he was unsettled by her presence.
"Need anything before I head to the den and watch some TV?" Bryan stopped in front of the chair she was sitting at and waited for a response. She shook her head back and forth, momentarily meeting his gaze before turning away again. Bryan sighed at her unwillingness to communicate with him and made his way to his perch in front of the television.
He was approximately twenty minutes into the show when he heard the sound of slow, heavy breathing. At first he thought it was a part of the programming, but the breathing quickly sped up until it sounded like someone was panting and gasping for their lives. Before Bryan fully registered the fact it was coming from Josephine, he heard a piercing scream come from the room next door.
"Josephine!" Bryan screamed in response, his heart pounding in his chest as he ran to the next room. He wasn't sure what caused her scream, but he prepared himself for the worst. Bracing himself, he rounded the corner but stopped short at the sight in front of him.
The scene was nothing near what he expected. Nothing threatening was present in the room, but Josephine was curled up into a ball with her hands covering her ears like she was cowering away from an invisible attacker.
"Josephine?" Bryan cautiously walked towards her tiny figure. As he approached, he noticed she was trembling. By then, he realized that her panting turned into shallow, uneven breaths. Bryan was unsure of what to do, especially since he had never really had to interact with a crying girl.
However, her need for help greatly overwhelmed his nervousness and uncertainty. Slowly, he bent down and rested his hand on her back between her shoulder blades.
"Shh..." he moved his hands in unsure circles, hoping to reassure the girl. His nervousness eased up when he realized that Josephine was calming down under his touch. With the increased confidence he asked, "What happened?"
"No...nothing..." Josephine sniffled and buried her head deeper into her arms, as if she did not want to look at Bryan in the eyes.
"That's a lie," Bryan insisted, "You couldn't have screamed at nothing."
He felt Josephine take a deep breath and shift slightly. Sensing that she wanted to get up, he removed his hand from her back. It took Josephine a few seconds before she was fully sitting upright.
"I'm not lying," she managed to take hold of Bryan's gaze with her own with uncanny confidence. "Sometimes, I just get panic attacks...it's no big deal."
Bryan didn't even need to hear what she was saying to know that she was lying to him. Although what she said made perfect sense, he recognized the look on her face when she said those words - it was the expression of someone hiding a secret that they didn't want anyone else to know. It was a look he knew all too well, since it was the expression he plastered on his face all the time when he was lying to strangers.
In that moment, Bryan realized that the two of them were birds of a feather. For the first time in his life, he met someone else who knew the pain and exhaustion of hiding a dark secret. He wanted to know her secret so he could comfort her, and maybe out of selfishness, he wanted her to do the same for him.
"Everyone has secrets they want to hide from the world," Bryan looked into Josephine's eyes. He noticed that her gaze wavered when he mentioned secrets. "I have my own, and I don't think anyone would believe what I have to say."
Josephine's head perked up in interest at his last sentence. All her life, her parents had told her to never tell anyone of the images haunting her mind. They told her to lie about the images and blame her visceral reactions on depression and anxiety. They told her that if she told anyone her secret, no one would believe her and people would imprison her in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of her life.
But here was a boy who claimed that he also had a secret that no one else would believe. She had felt incredibly lonely up until this point, like she was fighting against he world all by herself. However, when she looked into his eyes, they held all the sincerity in the world, and she trusted that she could reveal her secret to him.
"I would believe you if you told me what your secret is," Josephine cautiously suggested. She felt her cheeks burn from the awkwardness of her statement and looked down at the ground.
Bryan overlooked her discomfort, "Only if you tell me what you're hiding. I know that you're not suffering from just panic attacks."
Josie thought about the deal that Bryan proposed. Honestly, she was tired of hiding her secret and pain from others. If this gave her a confederate to rely on, she was willing to hand over her secret at the risk of being ridiculed. "You've got a deal."
Bryan's heart pounded at the reality of the situation, and he almost regretted his decision to open up to Josephine. He never imagined that the timid girl would readily agree to his offer. However, he couldn't go back on his deal. Not when he was already this far into it.
He racked his brain for the best starting point, and eventually he settled on stating a fact, "My brother and I were born only five years apart, even though he's currently forty-four years old and I'm twelve years old."
He could tell that Josephine was struggling to wrap her mind around the concept and already knew she didn't believe him. However, he felt the need to push on and tell her the truth...so at least one person outside his immediate family knew about his true self.
"When I was younger and just learning how to run, my parents discovered that something wasn't quite right with me. My mother first noticed it when she put me down to watch television in the den so she could cook dinner. One second, she could hear my laughter coming from the den in the kitchen, and the next second she would notice I was sitting at the dinner table. It was physically impossible to move through the house as quickly as I did.
"My father, who happened to be an engineer, installed video cameras throughout the house. They were able to catch the phenomenon on camera. They saw that I would stand up in one room and suddenly disappear, only to suddenly reappear in a different room...fractions of a second later. At first, he thought I could teleport. Only later did he find out the truth."
Bryan looked up at Josephine before delivering the final truth, "I can run at the speed of light."
Josie's reaction was equally split between a laugh and credulity. She wasn't sure if Bryan was playing her, but she also didn't want hurt him by laughing at his confession if it was actually the truth.
"You don't believe me," Bryan noted while eyeing her expression. Disappointment hit him square in the chest, and he stood up from his spot next to Josephine.
"Wait. Don't g-" Josephine immediately regretted her reaction to his story and reached towards Bryan, hoping he would sit back down. But in the middle of her plea, he disappeared. She blinked several times, thinking it was just an illusion of her eyes.
"I'm over here."
Bryan's voice called out from behind her, and a yelp escaped from Josephine's lips. Sure enough, when she turned around, she came face to face with Bryan.
"You just..." she grasped for the right words inside her brain, but all thought escaped her mind.
"I figured that a demonstration would be the best way to convince you."
Josephine nodded as she watched Bryan sit back down next to her. "You can actually run at the speed of light?"
"Well technically, it's almost at the speed of light." Bryan corrected her. "Nothing can actually move faster than the speed of light. Do you know why?"
She shook her head in response. All of this information was new to her and after witnessing Bryan's supernatural talent, her brain's processing power was fried.
"When someone moves as fast as I can, time slows down. Time grows slower and slower the closer I reach running at the speed of light. If someone ever travels at the speed of light, it means that time would stop for them. Taking it to the extreme, if someone were to ever run faster than the speed of light, they could travel back in time." Bryan paused. "It would break all laws of physics and relativity."
He gave Josephine time to process everything.
If time slows down for him when he runs quickly, this power must've been the cause for the age gap between Bryan and his brother, she reasoned slowly. But how?
"So let me get this straight: every time you run at nearly the speed of light, time for you passes by slower than the rest of the world?" she looked to Bryan for confirmation. After he nodded, she asked, "So the reason why you're thirty-two years younger than your brother is because you can run quickly and slow down your own time?"
"For every second I run at nearly the speed of light, four and a half days pass in the real world. This means that if I spend a minute running at a fast pace, nine months will pass," Bryan's voice trailed off, as his mind wandered into his past. "I was goofing off one afternoon when I was six. I did not understand the ramifications of my power, and what it meant for my family. I was playing with my brother, who was eleven at the time. He was chasing me, and I was running away with my power. I ended up running quickly without realizing it, and before I knew it, I was lost. It took me thirty-seven minutes of running before I found my way home again."
Josephine wasn't the best at math, but she knew that if nine months passed for every minute he ran, thirty-seven minutes of running was a very long time.
"It was only thirty seven minutes of my life that I spent looking for my way home. However, those thirty-seven minutes translated to twenty-seven years in the real world." Bryan bent his head down in shame. "I was still six years old when I returned home. However, my brother was thirty-eight and my parents were sixty-five and seventy-three years old. They spent twenty-seven years thinking I was dead. After that, I never ran again. I felt too ashamed and selfish to ever attempt it."
Bryan's voice cracked and Josephine could see tears forming, blurring out his warm brown irises. He never cried so hard in his life - not even after returning to his home after those twenty-seven years. The years of separation made him feel like he wasn't even part of the family anymore, and returning was like coming back to a house full of strangers. He spent six years trying to be a normal kid after returning, but revealing his secret for the first time was like catharsis.
"I'm sorry, Josephine," Bryan scoffed at himself while tears still poured down his face. "You probably think I'm insane."
Bryan's words resonated within Josephine. She was never one to judge anyone for being "insane" since she felt like she was struggling with insanity herself. However, she sensed that it was not the best to reveal her secret...at least not yet.
Bryan's confession was like the starting spark of their relationship, but sparks are delicate things. People have to fan the ember just the right amount: too much or too little will cause the fire to sputter out. With perfect care, the ember can be cultivated to a burning fire that brings warmth and comfort to those surrounding it.
If she also revealed her demons at that moment, she knew the fire would be overwhelmed by darkness. She needed to be there for Bryan and be someone he can feel comfortable with before revealing her own secret. So instead of telling him her secret, she opened up in a different way. She opened her heart and let Bryan in with a small gesture of friendship.
"You don't have to call me Josephine...it sounds too formal, and it is a mouthful. You can call me Josie."
"Josie?" Bryan looked up at her uncertainly, the name foreign on his tongue.
"Yup. Josie."
A/N: This is my first time publishing anything in a very, very long time. Thanks Kat for reading over this chapter first and giving me feedback :) Hope you enjoyed it and let me know your thoughts! Thank you so, so much for reading ♥︎