Unspoken Silence

story The sun beat through the curtains blinding me as a wake-up call. “The princess awakes. Eve, if you’re going to live here, your stuff has to stay on your side of the room.” My roommate, Cleo, bundled my crumpled jeans and t-shirts between her arms and shoved them beside my bed. “Cleo, I don’t want to live here or be here or die here,” I said as I rolled over to stare at the blank wall.

I sat on my bed and peered around the room. It seemed so blank compared to my colorful room at “home.” They only allowed us five pictures in the room. I wasn’t sure why five was the magic number. My 7-year-old niece, Savannah had painted me the ugliest blue frame and stuck a picture of us in the small slot. One frame held my boyfriend, Klatt and I last Christmas. Beside it was a huge group of girls when we were in high school. We were stuffing our faces with ice cream and laughing. I never thought after those glory days I would be stuck here. The smallest picture was in a tiny silver frame of me in my ballerina tutu the summer before I went to Julliard. Tried and failed, but I kept that picture just to capture my dream during my nightmare. I clutched the one in my hands of my mom holding me laughing in a field of sunflowers. I was very young in the picture, but I could remember the day so clearly.

“Pick Mama the prettiest sunflower you can find.” I smile and hand my mother the longest one of the bunch in my small arms. She laughs and giddily sticks it behind her ear. Her long auburn hair blows in the wind. “Evey, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I bend down to pick another flower and leap into the air. “A ballerina. I want to fly.” “Oh, Evey, you can’t always be a ballerina. You could be a teacher, a doctor or the President.” “No, Mama, I want to dance. I don’t want to be anything but a ballerina. I’m going to dance.” She smiles and picks me up in her arms where I feel the most secure. “Evey, my little princess, you can be anything you want to be.”

I didn’t belong in an insane asylum. Oh, they didn’t even call it that anymore. Society doesn’t call this place a psychiatric rehabilitation center. I was depressed. Half the world is depressed and they weren’t forced to live in this loony bin. Not all of the girls living in there were what I would label as crazy. They were the girls you meet every day at the supermarket or stand in line next to at the movies. Cleo was one of these women. Her medical papers labeled her as bipolar, yet I knew many people lived fulfilled lives with the disorder. I questioned why she was there. I didn’t know that she would be smiling and laughing one minute and in the next throwing a vase at the wall in a fit of rage. I didn’t fear living with her. I feared nothing. At one time I feared everyone and everything trying to be perfect. Then I came to the conclusion it was only myself that I feared.

“Where’s Cleo?” Klatt shut my door quietly and walked into my room. Visitors weren’t welcomed with open arms. They saw them as a symbol of weakness draining our energy so we would never better ourselves. Klatt was my link to the outside world. He was the only person who still believed in me. “I don’t keep up with Cleo. Sam had one of her breakdowns. I bet Cleo went to talk to her.” I threw one of my shoes at the closet letting it fall with a soft thud. There was never any point getting dressed in this jail. Klatt let his eyes roam around the room and settled on the floor. He had to be so bored. “Did you talk to the psycho lady today?” “No, Klatt, I didn’t talk to the psycho lady. Why do you ask me that? Don’t call her psycho either. She’s ridiculous; I have no reason to go pouring nothing to the stupid psychiatrist just so she can remind me I am nuts.” He just shook his head. “Eve...” He was quiet for a few seconds. It was that silence that fills the air with everything that has not been said. I wanted to just block everything out. I wanted everything to be normal. My family did not talk about things. “They’ll never let you out until you talk to them. They need reasoning as to why you are so depressed. I can’t keep coming here every weekend trying to convince everyone you aren’t crazy. You belong at Julliard. That’s were you were. Why did you forget that?” I felt the blood boiling. I felt like Cleo. He knew how to push my buttons. “Ya know, Klatt, why don’t you just make this all about you? Selfish that it‘s you that has to travel here and it’s you that has to tell everyone I’m not crazy. No, I’m not the one actually living it. I went crazy because my mom died. Klatt, tell everyone I went crazy because my mom died and I couldn’t handle it. I’m psycho, Klatt.” He shook his head. His eyes closed. “Don’t blow things out of proportion. I’m trying to help. You know you aren’t crazy. These rehab centers aren’t for people that are crazy. They are for people that need a push. You’re depressed and you need to work through it. You took pills wanting this. You wanted this, Eve. Now you dig yourself out.” He got off my bed slowly and slammed the door. I didn’t even cry. I didn’t care at that one moment. I peered into the mirror. My light blonde hair was thrown into a messy ponytail. My face was bony with no color. I remembered the days looking into a mirror with a face full of make-up and my hair perfectly curled for the school day. Things change so quickly and I could never grasp my fingers around reality long enough to bask in its rays.

My mom walks in my room and sits beside me on the bed. I know something is wrong because she doesn’t usually just come in here to chit-chat. “Hi princess. I didn’t know ballet would run so late today. I called your brother at Tech earlier about everything. Your dad and I have a lot to talk about in the next few months.” I bend down to take my tights off rolling them into a ball. Her voice is very serious and I feel my nerves start to rise. “It’s hard to talk to children about things. I know you aren’t exactly a child, but in my eyes you will always be my baby. Evey, please look at me.” Why was she rambling? I look up at her and her beautiful face looks twisted. “I’m sick.” I throw my tights at the dirty clothes hamper. “You’ve been sick for three months now. It’s a cold, you’ll shake it. You should really get some new medicine.” She took my hand and exhaled. ‘No, I’m really sick. I’m going to try some experimental therapy but I may even do some chemotherapy. It just doesn’t look very good right now.”

The cafeteria was relatively quiet. The television in the corner was on, but we could hear no sound. I walked to my usual table with my usual tray and sat down with the usual people. The same four of us sat together at the lunch table every day. I wondered how lunch would go once one of us departed from this place. Would we act like it was normal? I could not understand many people in that place except those girls. Maybe I just hadn’t tried to reach out to everyone. No one is normal in the world. What is normal? Normal to me was the outside world I had contact with for twenty six years of my life. Samantha always sat next to Cleo. Sam reminded me of a pristine mouse. She was very delicate and usually crying. Sometimes she seemed at ease with the world, but often her face was red and blotchy. Sabby sat across from me. She was a scary black cat to me. Her long black hair and glowing green eyes reminded me of the witches my mother used to tell me bedtime stories about. Sabby thought the world was against her and she hated the world for that reason. She had no family or friends. I thought she was there just to have a place to call home. If she left she would have nowhere to turn. “Why’d Klatt leave yesterday? No love luncheon happening?” Cleo said mockingly. She unwrapped a flat ham sandwich. I shook my head. “He just doesn’t understand.” “Boys are all the same. They won’t ever love us. Why do you want him hanging around to bring you down?,” Sabby’s words cut through the air. “He wants you to go back and be a dancer. He wants you to be the Nutcracker Fairy. Maybe you get mad, Fairy Princess because he tells you what you don’t want to hear.” Sabby was right. I just looked at her with no emotion. Her honesty was brutal. I wanted the truth to always be unspoken.

I squeeze her hand so tightly because maybe if I squeeze it hard enough she cannot drift away from me. “I love you, I love you.” I keep saying it over and over again as if it makes a difference. She has been sick for so many years. Our battle was coming to an end. My dad steps out of the room because it is too intense for him. He has privately said his final farewells each night. The monitors beep quietly. “Evey, keep dancing. You’re a wonderful dancer.” Her voice begins to trail off. “Don’t say your goodbyes. Let’s just sit here. I promise you won’t die.” Her hand squeezes mine and grows weaker. She closes her eyes. I stare at her as the machines begin to beep in a quiet, constant motion. One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t. I brush my hand across her face and stand up. I cannot feel anything.

“What were you feeling when you took those pills, Eve?” My therapist stared at me over her small rimmed glasses. She clasped her hands together and glared into my eyes. She thought she could detect something in them. “My head hurt. I was feeling the pain of my headache.” “Eve, you took fifteen Hydrocodene. Do you realize how strong these are? Were you trying to escape?” When I was prescribed Hydrocodene after getting my wisdom teeth out I never thought they would be of much use. “Yeah, that’s right. I was trying to escape a headache. It was a migraine and I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I was trying to sleep.” “I thought your head hurt?” She argued back with me. I pulled my knees to my chest sitting on that small orange couch. I had been closed all of my life. I did not want to sit there and tell this stranger my deepest thoughts. I didn’t tell myself my feelings. Did she seriously expect me to pour my feelings out like I was Tony on “The Sopranos?” “Until you start opening up in these sessions, Eve, you may never get thrown into the real world again.” I nodded my head. “Well, I had a headache and I took too many pain pills. Case closed. Can I leave?”

Where is my dad? He promised me this one time he would come watch me dance. It is my first recital in high school and he is not here. He told me he would come to this one because I was the star. I heard him grumbling to my mom that dance gets us nowhere in life. He still said he would come watch his little girl perform. He is never here. He is always too busy for me because he does not believe in me.

The moon poured through the window and cast a small light upon my face. I looked over to Cleo’s bed and realized it was empty. I could not fathom where she would be in the middle of the night. Sometimes we would go sit in each other’s rooms to chat about things or look through magazines someone brought from the outside world. I hated to be alone. I came from a world of dancers cluttering in a small dressing room. I lived for that feeling. That clutter of noise and crowd. The feelings I felt that night as I grasped that pill bottle crept into my veins, but I pushed them away as quickly as they came. I would not go through this again. This was just a step in my development as Eve. I wanted to feel my mom’s arms around me. I wanted her to hold me like she did when I was little. I sat up and gently touched the picture of us laughing in the sunflowers. I remembered laughing in the sunflowers and I remembered laughing in that hospital room. Laughing when the world was at its darkest hour for us, but we were still together. I felt a tear trickle down my cheek. I hadn’t tasted that light salt of a tear in so long. A tear meant I could feel. Kitty once told me that each tear means a different thing and each has a different origin. I wanted to get out of that place for my mom. God did not give me the talent of ballet so I could sit in this small room and let it all go to waste. I wanted to go back to Julliard because my mom believed I could.

I won’t dance anymore. My dad won’t come to my recitals. He came to one at Julliard. He even flew so he could see me dance at this level. This was my dream and I achieved it. It wasn’t his dream, it was his nightmare. I have failed so now his dreams have come true. He always told me dancing got me nowhere and I thought dancing got me everywhere. Dancing has led me to a dead-end street and I am nowhere. I pick up my tights and slippers shutting my locker for the last time. Dried flowers Klatt sent me for the performance last week break and glide to the floor as I slam the door. I must quit because she is not there to see me. How can I dance without my guardian angel? I don’t perform for them, I perform for her. I have to go home. I am dying inside. I don’t know how I drove to Kitty and I’s house that night. I don’t even remember the music playing on the radio. My mind was bouncing from this thought to that to every part of me that failed. Kitty is sitting on the couch reading a book. She knows this breakdown has been coming. She stands to reach for me because she can see it in my eyes, but I push her away. “I promised her, Kitty.” My best friend who had stood beside me since we were five-years-old stares into my distant eyes. She knew. She knew and couldn’t do a thing. “I promised her she wouldn’t die and she did. If I hadn’t let her she’d be here and I could dance. I can’t do this. I can’t do this anymore. How could I? HOW?” “Evey, Evey, stop, you had no control. Don’t let this control your life. You’re a dancer. You put everything on this because you think you can control the world and you can’t. She isn’t here. Face it. Why does that make you stop dancing?” I get angry because she doesn’t understand. I am alone because no one understands me. I don’t remember why it happened next. I don’t know why I wanted to hurt her. I slap her letting all of my anger flow into her instead of me. “I cannot control the hurt. It’s tearing me up. I can’t do it.” I screech as I watch Kitty stand there in tears. She cannot say anything. Crying not for the fact I physically hurt her, but the fact she cannot bear to watch her best friend in such pain. Neither of us have control and we cannot grasp reality.

I sit on the floor in my room. The moon shines in my window. My head is pounding. The thoughts are whirling through it. You are a failure. You let her die. You cannot dance. It isn’t successful. I shake my head, but it still hurts. I rock back and forth letting the tears fall to the floor. I try to find happy thoughts, but none are coming to me. No one calls anymore to see if I am okay. Klatt is at FSU enjoying his football scholarship. Kitty has not called to check on me. I cannot apologize, not yet. Pride interferes with my happiness. I do not want to dance anymore because no one cares if I am in the Nutcracker this Christmas. My mom. My mom. My mom. I need her. I want her here, not there. She doesn’t even play with me in my dreams. I am falling apart. I rock and don’t even try to wipe away the tears as they drown my sorrows. I grasp the orange pill bottle. I just want to fall asleep. Just a few. Just a few and I can sleep. I need to escape from this world.

Dad arranged for the family to come visit me once a month. He thought that would keep us in touch with each other. He didn’t want them to understand where I really was or why I was there. He tried to shield them from the truth as much as possible. What was new? My older brother and his wife stood awkwardly in the corner. We never spoke about our mother or real life, only about Savannah. I had gone to all of her soccer and t-ball games. She was even showing an interest in dance. Savannah jumped around on the bed entertaining herself. She was my sunshine. I loved to watch her and just smile. She was too young to understand this place and that made me comfortable. She let me escape by telling me about her boyfriends in kindergarten and playing hopscotch at recess. Dad didn’t like to come. He was dressed in a suit and tie as always. He hated me being there. He hated that his hard-earned money was going towards this place. He worked so hard for all of that money that we never saw him. “Klatt or Kitty come by to visit lately? Kitty got the understudy of the lead dancer back at Julliard. I saw her mom at a luncheon last week and she was telling me all about it. Oh, she was very excited.” Yes, I knew Kitty was an understudy. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but, yes, I still talked to my best friend. I was not going to jump into detail about Klatt coming to visit me and leaving angry. What was the point? To make him more disappointed in his fallen dancer? I wondered why he couldn’t get excited like Kitty’s mother and why he didn’t see the success in her accomplishments. I sat down and pulled Savannah into my lap. “Yeah, I knew about it. Klatt came by to visit last week. I hear Savannah here has a school play coming up.” Dad smiled. “Yes, yes, you know those two over there keep her involved in it all. Maybe soon you can make some of those events.” Which translated meant maybe soon I would get out of this place and maybe soon he would not have to fly here every month or pay to face the fact that since my mom left me I was trying to escape this world. I didn’t know if I was trying to escape this world or jump back into it. We made some more pointless conversation. Then it was over as soon as it began. He could not connect with me and he knew it. My dad did not allow failure so he tried to act like we were the Van Gogh of father and daughter relationships. We left too much unspoken. As I watched them walk away Savannah grabbed my hand. “Evey, Evey, I forgot to tell you Daddy said I can get a kitty if I do all my chores this week.” I watched my big, strong, perfect brother shake his head and laugh. He hadn’t gone insane. I just smiled and kissed her on the forehead. I just wish I could be that naive again. What an escape.

“Eve got flowers. Lucky, lucky.” Sabby set down the vase with six roses stemming from it. I rolled my eyes knowing they were from Klatt. He always sent me roses when things went wrong. It was our way of ending immature fights. Cleo stuck her hand out to receive the card. “Let me read it. From Prince Charming?” Cleo laughed as she read the card. “Blah blah blah. I love you. Blah blah, you are so special. Blah blah. Where’s the fun in that?” I knew one day they would each find true love. I was lucky to have one that had stood by me through the darkest hours. I was beginning to see the silver lining on the dark clouds I had focused on for so long.

“You’ve been accepted to Julliard.” My mother smiles at me softly. Kitty had already been accepted so I had been anxiously awaiting this letter for weeks. It wasn’t the way I dreamed it, but it was a dream blossoming to life in front of me. I rip the envelope from her hands and read over the fine print. I shake my head and begin to cry as I quickly put it on the counter. I have waited for this moment since I was a tiny girl in my first recital, but I cannot go. My mother gently grabs my chin with her hand. “Evey, I know what you’re thinking. My little princess, you’ll go to school. You can’t take care of me forever. It’ll do you no good to sit around here and watch me. I’m going to be fine. I’ll be at your recitals. Dance, Eve, Dance.” The words my mother had told me my whole life. It was the advice I lived by. I smile and jump up and down. I feel the excitement stream through my veins. “I’ll make you proud, Mama, I promise.” It became another fallen promise.

Cleo and I were flipping through fashion magazines when we heard a knock on the door. No one ever knocked here. Cleo yelled for them to come in not moving off of her bed. My father walked in. He did not have his usual suit and tie on, but slacks and a Polo t-shirt. My first thought was that maybe I was in a dream or maybe he had come to do business with the institution. I mumbled a hello, but mainly just stared in silence. He stood there for a minute with his hand resting in his pocket. Cleo rolled the magazine in her hand. “Hi, Mr. Thompson. Want some tea? I’ll go get Sam and we’ll bring some tea.” Cleo didn’t hide her anxiety of my father very well. She quickly fled past him out the door. “Is everything okay?” He stood there so perfect, yet strict. I was worried he had come to yell at me for being such a disgrace or talk to me about getting better just like he had all of my life. I would beg for him to come to my dance recitals and he would tell me in his monotone voice that dancing was ridiculous and I need to be a CEO and that I needed to be successful. He sat beside me quietly still not saying a word. He shook his head quickly. “Nothing is wrong, Eve. Maybe I thought visiting my daughter should be high on my priority list. I want to talk to you about... this. I just don’t like the thought of you being here. You don’t belong.” I almost felt defensive and wanted to explain that these people were not abnormal, they were just unstable. I didn’t say a word though. “I had to put you in here because I didn’t want to lose you. I lost your mother and if you had stayed at school or tried to live at home I feared you could not handle it.” I saw tears in his eyes. I had never seen his tears, not even at my mother’s funeral. “Eve, I want you to dance.” He had never uttered these words; he hated me dancing. He knew it was my mother’s dream. “You never came. You didn’t want me onstage.” I could hear myself talking, yet I could not feel the words. They were tumbling from an unknown destination. “It was your mother who wanted you to dance. She dreamed of it and she always talked about it. She wanted you to reach your dreams. I couldn’t come to Julliard and see what your mother wanted to see. It was entirely too difficult. She was so sick that one time she came. She was just so sick and I couldn’t... “ It hit me the pain he went through every day. He had probably wanted to escape just like me, yet he didn’t have the level of immaturity his daughter possessed. He carried the weight of his children, his job, his money... He wanted things to be normal. I wanted things to be normal. After countless minutes of sitting there in silence I looked over at him. “I’ll dance again, Daddy.”

My father’s belief was the weight holding me down from trying to jump back into reality. All I needed was that belief as my magical tool to play in the world once again. Klatt had told me I wanted to be there. He had been right. I could have talked my way out if I had seriously wanted to leave. I could have talked to my therapist every day, pouring my feelings to her. I wanted this. Like Sabby wanted this. She would never leave because it was the place that allowed her to safely hate the world. It was a place that listened to her hate the world because in the real world no one listened to her. I had things to do in the world. I had to dance and I had to live. I began to speak to the therapist. I no longer needed a way to escape because I was escaping by communication itself. I had been so angry all of my life because I thought my dad’s love was absent. Instead of being my dad’s work slave, I became a Fairy Princess. I had learned my dad just didn’t know how to show his love. I just needed that one person to say, “Dance, Eve, Dance,” and I could dance through the rain.

“I’m going back to Julliard. That’s where I’ll start.” I sat staring at the board of people that decided if I could be released. They decided if I was allowed to fly. My father sat across from me folding his hands on the table. “This will be your last year then you can graduate. Is this correct?” I nodded. “Yes. I have spoken to my old roommate and to my dance instructors. They support my decision.” I think they all knew I had lived through my escape. I was ready to fly.

Saying goodbye was the hardest part for me. How do you say goodbye to the people that have held you on their wings for so long? I hugged Sabby first and though she hated the world I saw tears in her eyes. She didn’t really hate me. I hugged Samantha and let her cry as I knew she would. Then I clutched Cleo for a long time. I knew one day she would jump back into her world of social margarita mixers and tiki torch parties. I knew she would one day be standing beside me in my wedding. I had lived in this “psychiatric rehabilitation center” for seven months, but I had made lifelong bonds and learned many lessons that helped mold me. I realized there was life outside of dancing. I realized there were people in this place that had led perfect lives but were here trying their hardest to just not have to lead that perfect life. I had gotten stuck somewhere when my perfect little life was turned upside down by tragedy and I was a turtle on its back trying to flip back over. All of the silence inside and between was being contained like an overfilled kool-aid pitcher. I had to talk, to live, to breathe and mainly to want to live in my world again. It took months of hope, of love and of expression to dance to the music of my new life. My unspoken silence was now spoken loudly.