Silence

Silence

“Dude, just fucking quit.”  To Thomas it seemed so simple.  My problems weren’t exactly that big of a deal when you think of how bad some people have it, like starving kids in the inner city, but once you let that thought creep into your head you’re already too far gone.  I’m entering my third year of college and it’s the worst time of my life. 

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I had what I thought was a pretty normal childhood until I would go to my friends houses.  Their houses were always clean; their parents were nice to each other.  Don’t get me wrong, my parents were great to my brother and I, but no 16-year-old kid should have to stand in between his mother and father so that his dad doesn’t hit his mom.  “I’ll beat your ass,” he says as he stares into my eyes, almost like a man I never met.  It takes a lot of energy to repress a memory like that.  I never knew how often incidences like that occurred throughout my childhood until I really thought about it.  I had been training myself to feel nothing and it would all build up to be too much at some point.

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I have never actually put a gun in my mouth and I’m thankful for that.  I don’t think that I would ever actually do it because I’d be too scared to.  But the fact that the thought actually crossed my mind terrifies me; because I don’t really know what I would’ve done had one been readily available.  Up to that point, I was doing well.  I was really good at ignoring what was hurting me and I think I had high school football to thank for that.  For the first time in my life I was alone with my thoughts.  Until then, I always had my brother when I was growing up and then I had my roommate when I first began college.  My grades had slipped by this time though and I was living alone in an on-campus apartment that was more of a jail cell and less of a home. 

It’s difficult to describe what it feels like to be truly depressed.  I hear people all the time say that they’re depressed because they didn’t get to see a movie or the book they read didn’t have the ending they had hoped for and it makes me angry.  It’s one of those words we toss around way too much because it’s convenient.  The hardest part for me though was that this was a brand new experience for me.  I didn’t have the healthiest relationship with my girlfriend in high school and my first year of college was mostly spent talking to her on the phone and driving my new roommate insane in the process.  But by this time, we had broken up and all I had was an apartment that didn’t talk back to me.  This was essentially the first time in my life that I was alone with my thoughts and coincidentally; it was the worst timing possible.  I had come to be afraid of my silent apartment.  I would leave the television on when I went to bed.

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“I don’t know, I never really had a choice,” I say.  My Dad works at an engineering firm and I was to be the third generation in my family to work there.  “I have tried to tell him I don’t want to do this, but he just keeps telling me there’s no money in what I want to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I have no idea,” I say.  I got a job at a liquor store where I met Thomas.  The guy turned out to change my life, but I didn’t recognize that until he moved away.

“There’s nothing wrong with that.  Fuck that, if you don’t like it just quit.”

I really liked how Thomas would just put things so simply.  To this point in my life, I had never really met someone like that.  This is the same person that would tell me about how religion, Christianity specifically, was complete bullshit and would throw in the occasional Jesus joke and I wanted to pretend to be offended at first, but then I realized everything he would say, I had already secretly thought in my head. 

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I never slept during that semester.  There was a three-day stretch where I maybe got 5 hours of sleep and I don’t even know how I functioned.  As a result of this, I didn’t pass a class that semester.  My parents called me lazy when I tried to tell them I was miserable.  If you can’t go to your parents, whom do you go to?  The loneliness was inescapable.

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The first person that ever gave me the confidence to truly be myself was a 27-year-old liquor store manager from West Texas that was nothing like how I wanted to live my life.  This whole time I had been so fixated on becoming an engineer, making a hundred thousand dollars a year and driving a nice car.  I honestly had never once thought about what would make me happy in life until I met him.  He taught me to question everything, religion included and it was something I was increasingly interested in.  I’ve since changed my major and going to school isn’t so much of a chore anymore.  I live with my brother and my girlfriend now and I still talk to Thomas occasionally, but not as often as I want to.  I still haven’t told him that he saved my life and I don’t know when or if I ever will.  I like to think that he already knows that.

I try to think about that dark period in my life often, because I do not want to forget it.  I do not want to hide what my past is because I am afraid of blowing up again.  I now know that the best way to cope with things is not to hide it, but to confront it.  So here I am, a 23-year-old debt-ridden college junior, completely content with life and not afraid of when the house goes silent.