Voiceless

I haven't spoken once in the last two years.

This realization gripped me as I stood in front of the cracked, dirty mirror. I gazed at my own reflection, taking in my ragged appearance. Shaggy, dull brown hair that could probably stand a trim. Dark, knitting eyebrows, made to seem even darker in contrast to my eyes: the lightest of greens, flecked with silver. The mouth that hadn't emitted a single word for so long, I had forgotten what my own voice sounded like. Had it been soft or booming? Rough or smooth? Well, not that it mattered.

I hauled my tattered backpack onto my shoulder, wincing at the unwanted weight. The battered gray apartment door I walked toward looked as though it had seen a lot in its difficult days. A deep dent that could have been a bullet mark was set near the knob. I slid out of the apartment, and suddenly, I wanted to talk so badly. I didn't want this life, wandering from apartment to apartment with a notebook, a pen, and a few bucks tucked into an old gray backpack I'd found abandoned by a dumpster.

I reached out, trying so hard to grasp the concept of what I really wanted. A home. A family. But maybe my time with those things was over, taken away so many years ago with a single, careless accident. The one that had made me never want to speak again, ever. So often, I wondered what life would be like if I chose not to leave home and travel along silently. Where would I be now? Some orphanage? Or adopted and trying to forget what had happened?

I considered this as I walked down the dirty hallway. Then, suddenly, a door in front of me burst open. It was on my right side, and as it surrendered to the force behind it, a stench washed out of the room behind the door that nearly made me gag. A long-haired man stumbled out of it, drunkenly tripping over a cardboard box. He saw me and stood still for a moment, matted gray hair all over his face and crumbs in his week-old beard.

He spoke.

"Wots yeh doin' here, keed?"

Which, in sober-speak, would have been "Watcha doing here, kid?" Here it was, an opportunity. To speak. To break the silence.

I opened my mouth, feeling the full weight of two years of silence hanging on me, a weight just as real as the old backpack dangling off of my thin shoulder. I hesitated, drew a deep breath...

"Martin! MARTIN!" The sound came from deep in the filthy apartment, a woman's voice.

"I'm comin', sweetie!" The man gaped at me once more, and my chance to break the silence lumbered back into the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

My unused mouth clamped shut, and I walked down the hallway, silent again.