Silence

Let me tell you a story...

It's a story about a boy and a girl, two people with extreme hearts and extreme faults. Two people who, unbeknownst to them for quite some time, needed each other more than they needed air to breathe.

This story begins with an ending...


She lay there, thinking about it all. Thinking about everything she had ever given up to be at this exact moment in time. It was heartbreaking, infuriating, and sickening to let every misstep cross her mind this way... but she was numb. And in that numbness she found something even more worse than every other past mistake she could think of - in her numbness, she found the truth.

The truth was that she was a terrible person. Ever since she had been old enough to understand what kinds of things got people's attention, and how to shift attention to herself, she used it. She wanted nothing more than to be the top priority on everyone's list. She hit from every angle to possess people's thoughts - the victim, the con-artist, the innocent one, the beautiful one, the one you could count on, and the one you could never ever trust. She was every single one of these personalities, and she played them like a deck of cards.

In her silent reverie, she let herself disappear into memory, going back many moons to a time when she could still remember a smile crossing her lips that wasn't planned or faked. And in this memory was the boy.

After a long day's journey north and back, the girl sit in the backseat of a car, again silent and her mind wandering on past occurrences. The boy, sitting next to her, had taken notice of her silence and felt a sense of uneasiness in her silence. He never liked when her face held any emotion short of happiness, and he'd always felt it was his duty to ensure it's return when it was missing. In the girls memory, the details had gone, but she remember that some conversation had taken place. The boy had offered to be a refuge for her weary head, and the girl accepted. In quietness, she lay her head on his shoulder, and they rode down a nameless highway, awaiting their return home, slowly drifting to sleep the whole while.

They awoke when the car stopped outside of the girl's house. As soon as she had become conscious again, something within her was instantly off. The familiarity of her surroundings was annoying and depressing. She's rather have been anywhere but here - she'd have rather been at the ocean, swimming in the cold midnight waters and freeing her soul from the constraints of future and past. The boy, tired and left slightly cold by the absence of the girl's touch, wondered why she looked so unhappy to be where she was. He'd always wondered that, and had always wanted to change that.

They, and another good friend who had accompanied them the day, dragged themselves into the house, heavy with sleep. They made no attempts to make it to the upstairs bedrooms, instead they all found a spot in the living room to settle for the night. The girl, having some small sense of hospitality, insisted that the guests take the couches, and that she would take the floor. "I'm fine, I like the floor, anyway," she said, as the boy insisted she take his spot on the couch. "Are you sure?" He asked, not wanting to give in too easily to the comfort of the warm surface? "I'm sure. Go ahead. I'll be out soon."

The girl curled up into her blankets and slept, letting her earlier troubling thoughts disappear. The boy lay awake on the couch above her. He watched as she slept, and felt there was something in her unconscious state that hinted at an innocence and a vulnerability that she'd rather not let the world see when she was awake. Before too long, the girl's eyes again opened, and she found the boy's gaze awaiting her.

In the most subtle of ways, the girl's eyes asked one simple question: "Watch after me?" And to this, the boy's eyes responded, "With my life."

The girl soon lost herself to drowsiness once again, but not before the boy had managed to convince her to take the more comfortable sleeping arrangements. He lay on the floor, and again just watch her til she was asleep. He let himself drift off as well.

No one, not even the girl herself, quite knows what happened after this night. She awoke the next day, hard of heart and blind to much around her. She knew nothing but sadness and contempt for that which she called home. The boy struggled many nights, doing all he could to replace her smile, to make it genuine once more, but his attempts were to little avail. The girl ran away countless time, crying injustice at wrongs she had cause for herself and causing pain for all those who surrounded her - even the boy. It seemed there was nothing that could stop the badness that had enveloped her soul, and that she would take down with her everything that touched her. And after too many fights, the boy now refused to be her guardian any longer.


Now aware of all her wrongs, the girl lay, not quite sure what to do or where to go. She stare off at a ray of sunlight that came in through her window. It traveled toward her and burned where it touched. Sunshine, she thought, was something meant for those who were worthy of being rescued from within the dark, not those who did everything in their power to put themselves there. So, she closed the curtain, and contemplated the disheartening silence that was now her eternal punishment.