ScreamS & WhisperS

Something whispers in my ear.

Many things rather.

Other things scream, shout, yell! They are so obvious, I agree with these all the time. I yell, shout, and scream back! With fervor, and joy, and tears, and hope, and declare how true it all is. Impassioned and drunk with the unanimity in what I feel and hear, form the ether to the concrete. How could it be any other way?

I hear so many things.

But something whispers in my ear.

Like a sepernet, it adroitly sneaks its way through all of the screaming, shouting, and yelling. It snakes past the truth I hold so dear to my person. It slithers right in through my ears, to my mind, where it tries to wrap itself around everything it can find. This whisper is ever present, from the same reservoir that come the shouts. The lifeblood of my faith, or lackthereof. Informed by the things that do and do not happen to me, the feelings I experience and do not experience, the things in between that which I believe to know, actually know, know to not know, and every other combination of feeling, knowing, caring, loving, smelling, hating, crying, breaking, creating, dozing, faking, fating, mating, writing, trying, doing, being, seeing, believing, seething, peeing, breathing, swimming, flying, dying, and so many other -ings. All of these -ings I may or may not know, they make up the shouts and whispers I hear.

The strong and present -ings are always so loud. How could I ever not hear them? I stake myself on those, would die for these -ings. They compose my being, my soul, my voice, with and through which I scream back. Everyone who knows me, loves and hates me, does it because of these shoutings.

But sometimes a whisper turns into a scream. As though if my -ings were a wildly intricate system of tunnels, all interconnecting with occupants, and details, and things making them whole, and what they are. Then comes a storm filling all of these tunnels, wall-to-wall, beyond recognition. Washing away those -ings, those things that made me who I was. Sometimes everything I thought I knew gets submerged, drowned by a whisper.

This thing, this whisper, is not what I want to know, love, hate, or believe. It is often vile, vitriolic, those -ings that make me cringe, fatalistic, suicidal, misanthropic, and many other -ings I do not even want to list out. These whispers are those things I do not want to feel, or understand. They are the void to all that is my whole. A dangerous place that sucks what it can finds, and bends, and breaks it beyond recognition, and spits out it out the other side of which I could never find. Perhaps that is what FUBAR means.

Something whispers, and I drown. Sometimes in misery, sometimes in tears, sometimes in this void. It comes for me, it comes so fast sometimes I could have never seen it coming. Soemtimes it comes so slow, I am in anguish because I saw it coming long ago and could do little about it.

These whispers do not discrimnate. They do not avoid, or permiss, or forgive, or allow. They are anti-pathetic, the formation and embodiment of antipathy. Unfeeling and uncaring, all-consuming.

Sometimes I hear whispers, and I stop feeling. Stop feeling the world, and its people, and those -ings, and those movements, the motions, the turbulence, the love and hate I knew so well, the texture of the fabric of my bed, which cradled me at night, the thrill of not knowing what tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year had in store for me, when the sun strikes my skin after having been tucked away in isolation for too long, and I feel my heart lean towards the warmth as though if I was a tree, full of life and spirit, belonging to a world that was always mine, the faith in things that were always meant to be and that weren't, the trust I beared and was given, the hope I had in those things that were out of my control, what the future has in store for me, and all of those around me, and all of those around them, and all of those around them's them, what it means to feel adequate, and cared for, and caring for, the joy of grabbing a loaf of bread, cracking the butt off, handing it to a friend, digging the dough out, rolling it into a ball, and eating it, feeling the leather soles of new sneakers rub the back of your ankles raw, until they blister, and the smell of garbage -- oh the smell of garbage!! -- how it grosses me out, the desire to gag, to react to thing out of disgust, because you love purity and wholeness so much. All of those things stop when the whispers turn to screams.

I can be paralyzed by these whispers sometimes. For days, months, maybe even years once before. I do not know. These whispers don't operate on one axis of time. They are not heard linearly -- they oscillate, like the thrill of meeting someone new for the first time, or starting a hobby and growing with it for years. These whispers come and go. I have learned to know when they are slithering around. When they are making their way in. Sometimes they don't or can't for long bouts of time -- but they will come.

They will try to take away all that I love, and hate, and know. And when these whispers come, what do I do?

I scream. I scream so loud my lungs begin to bleed, and it bubbles up my throat, and my esophagus is raw, and my mouth is dry, and legs begin to ache (because I have to stand when I am screaming) and my fists are clenched. I scream! scream yell shout kick fight die be born again and roll away and back up and fly!!! I scream, because I know what I feel, I know who I am, who I want to be. I scream back with all those -ings that made me, taught me to know better than to ever listen to the whispers.

Because that's the strangest part about this. Did I ever stop to ask myself: why are you listening?

I scream and break the whispers' spell. I drain the tunnels of my mind, and reclaim what was submerged. I rediscover myself, love those -ings more than I did before, and continue on my journey of listening to those impassiond cries of a life that is loved and to be well lived.

I scream, because I am so happy to be hearing myself again, and those that I love.