Schizo

• Madelynn Holmes, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2009

It was something about the silence that made her head numb. Like a vacant humming over her thoughts that wouldn’t shut the hell up. So quiet, yet so irritating. It shouldn’t be there.
It was hard to explain, there was no sense to it. But she knew it was happening again when she started concentrating on blank space. Nothing visible. It made her frown.
It was like someone was talking in the back of her head, she didn’t understand the words but she knew it was begging her to eavesdrop, silently pleading for a response. The voice would become louder, and then so quiet she’d have to strain to hear. Sometimes it was more than one; a hundred voices, arguing, yelling at each other, mocking her, maybe even screaming.
She tried to ignore it; she had at least that much self control. She counted on that—on her sanity to save her, but she was sure it was slipping away; sometimes slowly, sometimes too fast to realise. She tried desperately to form an explanation, a description, an image in her head of what was happening to her. But trying to express it, to identify its essence was a mission, something she could hardly grasp.
And then as abstractly as it came, the voices would leave her alone for days at a time. That too-loud nothingness that drove her mad, crazy for sure, it abandoned her, and she felt alone again. She struggled with her memory to recall what it was like, but she ended up feeling frustrated and exhausted.
‘Forget about it, it’s nothing’; she’d calmly and quietly say aloud, but just as the words escaped her lips it would return. The feeling, the mute voices? The what? Madness.
She became panicked. Why could she still hear it? It was getting louder. Drowning her own thoughts.
She saw faces now, in her mind, shaking their heads, smirking, for no reason, none other that to make her feel this way.
She was sure she could hear the words ‘crazy, crazy, crazy’ coming out of their non existent mouths.
No, please no, please! Don’t tell anyone, they won’t get it, no one does, not even me.
She felt strange, like someone was about to burst in at any moment with a tray off pills and a disposable cup of water. Only inanimate objects are disposable, correct? She didn’t want to be thrown away because of these voices, because of these faces. She wanted to be able to sit in a silent, dark room and hear nothing, see only black.
Shut up, I’m normal, sane, fine, just shut up. Not crazy, I’m not crazy. I’m not…
She would rather be anything – disabled, deaf, crippled – anything but insane.
But her mother didn’t believe her. Honestly, she didn’t believe herself. And now she was at the clinic.
Just tell me! Tell me it’s all in my head! Tell me I’m fine!
“You’re not insane, dear. It’s a serious disorder,” the doctor explained. “You have schizophrenia.”