I Didn't Want To Know

• Lily Tomlinson, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2018

It all started with an uncomfortable twitch. First in my left ear, then in my right. Somehow it was always there as if on the verge of becoming something else. And it did. On the third day of the twitch I was in school and a faint buzzing filled my ears. I ignored it at first but the harder I tried to ignore it the louder it got. By the end of the day my mother had dragged me to three different doctors complaining about a 'violent ringing in my daughter’s ears'. In return each doctor had said the same thing, 'there appears to be nothing wrong with her'. That night I didn't sleep. I wouldn't sleep again.
It was 9:00 at night when the whispers started, indecipherable voices bouncing off the walls of my mind, barely there but disturbing all the same. The next day I did everything I could to block the voices out, but nothing, nothing could get rid of them. I walked into school puffy eyed, tired and above all scared. Scared that I was losing it, scared that I was mental, scared to ask for help. But perhaps the scariest thing of all was that I knew, I knew. That the whispers were voices of other people trapped in my mind. I was scared because I knew that no matter how impossible the thought, what was happening to me was real.
That's how it changed. The fear of knowing threw me over the edge, threw them over the edge. They could feel my fear and they used it to seep into my mind and tell me everything. I couldn’t stand their whispering. All their thoughts, all their judgement. I knew it all, I heard it all. It made my skin crawl. “Madeline are you ok?" Asked Mrs. Woodly, but I barely register the question my mind was seething, head throbbing, a single tear ran down my face. Then I snapped. I needed silence, all I wanted was silence. I threw my desk across the room sending papers flying, I took deep ragged breaths as I surveyed the room, hearing the thoughts of everyone in it. "Get out of my head!" I shrieked, it was the kind of sound that made your stomach turn and your head split in two, it was barely human at all. Then I ran and ran and ran. I felt as though a knife was piercing through my skull. Suddenly I was standing there, the wind blowing up at me, the ground seemingly miles away. It was calming really, the thought of silence. Oh how I wanted the silence.
I remember jumping, I remember the voices multiplying as everyone watched me fall, I remember the feeling of my skull splitting in two because at the sound of 1000 screams. And then I finally had my silence.