Suffer the Slings and Arrows

By the sixth month, Alexi had come to regard the silence of his home as a sort of friend- or more properly, as a guardian. He wasn't sure if it was delusion or his growing inability to deal with the outside world, but he had found himself more and more frequently wrapped up in a rage that had no certain cause. Some timess it was traffic, some times the weather, but most disturbingly was when he realized total strangers were making his mouth sneer, his teeth grind, and his blood boil.

Everyone occasionally gets the paranoid suspicion that the laughing couple that just past you was laughing AT you. Or, that neighbors watch you in the corners of their eyes. Most people even harbor the sneaking suspition that their friends maliciously gossip behind their backs.

For Alexi, these were less uspitions and more shameful facts. If women across the stree began to whisper, it was surely something about him. If a friend slighted him, it was certainly intentional. And any time someone laughed, for any reason or at any time, a furious blush would rise to Alexi's cheeks and he would avert his eyes.

In short, Alexi found himself in a constant state of humiliation, which quickly became silent rage and, eventually, an intense, acute sense of self-loathing. No matter how much anger Alexi could muster against his persecuters, he always turned inward, seeing the flaws and deficiencies that had earned him such universal scorn.

What Alexi understood, but could not rationalize, was that his problem stemmed from an unhealthy, egotistical facination with himself. He knew that people had lives outside of him, but could never hear anything but malicious intent in their stares and mutterings.

If ego was the mother of his problem, fear was certainly the father. He lacked self-confidence and feared the rejection of his peers so much that it just seemed easier to keep to himself. And even as he saw the opportunities for love and happiness slip through his fingers, Alexi comforted himself with the knowledge that at least they weren't making fun of him. Ironically, it was this same cowardice that stayed his hand every time the humiliation seemed too great to bear for even a day longer.

And so, Alexi began to love the silence of his isolation. It was that, or give in and go mad. He tried music first, but began to find even old favorites grinding on his nerves in time. Books seemed logical, but even the sound of his own mental voice had become too much to bear. Every word seemed to echo in his skull with the dull crashing of waves breaking against distant shores. In the end, only silence would do.

Complete, all-encompassing silence. Like the oblivion of dreamless rest, Alexi's life had become a noiseless dream. Waking up began to confuse him, and one day he simply never awoke. His face was not screwed into a pained, furious grimace- though, it was not blissful, either. Alexi's face was utterly neutral, like one who has finally and gratefully sacrificed every joy in life to spare themselves from its miseries.