The Whispers

26: The End

"What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?" - Emil Cioran, Romanian-French philosopher and essayist.

When I first heard a bug speak to me I was terrified. I wanted to tell my mother but I knew she would put me in St. Kerry's like she did with dad. I wanted to tell Dallas but I didn't want him to think of me any different. I wanted to tell Maggie but I didn't want her to think that she might hear things one day, too. I kept it inside for eighteen years and I'm not sure how Dad managed until his twenties. It's torturous to keep these things in - nobody understands what's you're going through, nobody knows the real you, and so you pretend to be normal. Pretend to be okay. Don't talk to the rest of the people at school and focus on a select few that can't ever know who you truly are.

In the end, if I hadn't hit rock bottom, then I probably could have lived with it forever and nobody would ever know. I would have gotten married eventually, maybe had a kid of my own, and gotten some undergrad degree that nobody cares about. I probably wouldn't have been happy given that Maggie had died and my parents would have been absent, but at least I wouldn't be in a mental institution. It would have been better for me, however, that's not how things went at all. Things just kept getting worse and worse for me and I didn't even do anything wrong - I didn't deserve anything that happened to me. I didn't deserve to lose my family, to have my father's illness, to fall for a criminal, or get addicted to illegal substances.

I didn't deserve any of it.

Perhaps that's the moral of the story.

When a bug first spoke to me, the words were simple and precise.  They were small but enough to fill my ears with the small whisper, making me hyper-focus for days on the question they asked.

"Can you hear me?"

I remember thinking that someone was standing next to me and trying to say something but I had been ignoring them. I turned my head to apologize but nobody was there - there was just a mosquito buzzing around my head.

I thought that someone was pranking me but after circling the house I found nobody. I was confused but things became more clear when the mosquito came into view again.

"Are you Norton's daughter?"

I had screamed as loud that my lungs allowed me and quickly ran back into the house.  I knew that Dad had told me this might happen and I didn't want to believe him.

"Why'd you scream?" Mom asked.  She read a newspaper at the dinner table while Maggie watched tv in the other room.   She spoke in a pointed tone, as if she were judging me for being scared.

I don't blame her now. She didn't know what I had screamed about.

My little mind was working itself into a state of fear. Fear that if I told my mother that she wouldn't believe me, that she would somehow get mad at me, or that she would keep me in a room forever like Dad. 

"I saw a garden snake," I lied. I wanted to tell her about the bugs, I really did, but I couldn't bring myself to. The fear was too real and the voices could have just been my imagination running wild.

It wasn't.

***

I've grown accustomed to silence.

When I was much younger, when Dad was still at home and Mom still pretended to care, Maggie and I would sit in my room and be quiet. Sometimes we would just be sitting there, refusing to talk because we finally had a moment of peace. Peace from Dad always screaming at thin air, talking to bugs that we can't hear, and having episodes of seeing things. Scary things that he was convinced were real. Things like the floor caving in and turning into a black hole, things like a mob of people running after him like the Frankenstein monster, things like all of us somehow spontaneously dying in front of him. Things that cause him to scream and wail, to pound his fists against the wall and hit his head until he passes out. He claimed that not every 'vision' he saw was bad - the bugs gave him good ones.