NUMB

Numb

Numb. We’ve all felt it before, right? The lack of sensation in your toes, the crooked stiffness in your muscles, the search for something that isn’t there.

Numb.

What happens when you can’t feel anything? There’s calm before the tempest, but they don’t tell us who or what comes after. You won’t be the same they say. It’s not always for the better. Sometimes the rainwater patters against the windshield, temporarily blinds what’s in front of you, and in that blindness, you unknowingly stumble upon everything you’ve been missing. Sometimes the storm is full of darkness, riddled with hail: when blindness guides you to terror, when the layers you hide behind are grasped by its winds and whisked into oblivion, when you are utterly exposed: An ant walking upon man's sidewalks to be smushed under the weight of circumstance. Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine after the rain and when it pours it pounds away, slowly crumbling the sediment that built the old you, and the new you, the gnarled, crippled version of you is what stays.

Numb. The purgatory between loss and growth.

I stare at the remains of myself in the mirror. To the eyes, I seem fine. I still have my goofy smile, I still go to class, I eat, I watch TV, I take naps, I even joke. And I repeat. It's not just my eyes that confirm my normalcy, it's the eyes of everyone else around me. And you…

But the eyes lie. And if they lie, what truly lies behind them?

We weren’t meant to be all-seeing, our ears weren’t meant to hear everything, our hands can’t hold the world, we have a limited supply of taste buds, and we have yet to experience the sweetest aroma or most fetid stench. The eyes just don’t lie, the senses do too, so when you look at a person and examine them with your limited perception, know there might be a numb soul behind gleaming eyes.

Numb. When will I unthaw?

2021

My brother broke down today in practice. The sound of elastic leather bouncing off glossy hardwood littered my ears and somewhere in between, I heard his sobs. It was sudden but only natural. Our cousin died the day before. Steph. I’d lie if I said we were the closest cousins. He was older, a trucker that propelled all eighteen of his semi’s tires across the divots, peaks, valleys, and fields of America. Him and the endless interstates. I’d watch him post on Instagram every day. Steph brightening the camera with his smile, Steph doing pushups, Steph running, Steph just being Steph.. In this world, it's hard to be yourself, and I admired him for that. But, hindsight never lies.

What was the purpose of the Videos? Was he really happy, or showcasing his loneliness and crying for help? I should have called more…

What did Steph teach me? Freedom. The ones that break their chains first are the ones who express themselves unapologetically. They inspire the rest of us to unshackle. They're the ones we naturally gravitate to because if we can get just close enough, we might find the key to our prisons. It seemed like he was free: free on the road with wavy fields of grass, clustered mountain ranges, the endless blue skies, and cotton-puffed clouds. Then he overdosed.

Time is a human's greatest commodity. And burden. We love, we laugh, we embrace. Time flies with joy. We mindlessly spend it in bliss. It slows when we grieve and seems to halt when you’re numb. Time, the sharpest of all double-edged swords, a blade that never dulls. That’s why it punctured me with guilt. Guilt for living on because my time should be spent in grief.

March 23rd, 2022:

A regular day of off-season morning weights. My brother, Jaelan, my identical twin, and I always dreaded the moment our alarms opened our eyes, our bodies still partially locked in a dream. We’d completed our respective morning routines, plopped ourselves into our red Hyundai, the leather seats stiff and frozen from a heatless night, and hurried along to the school to change into our gear.

The first thing my brother and I heard walking into the locker room was, “Nah, it’s not him.” On a usual day, we’d all be sitting, our asses to the edge of our name-tagged lockers, our eyes in a pseudo-sleepy fog while we all pandered on about how uneventful being here this time in the morning was. Truly, we didn’t have it that bad but complaining in many ways was therapeutic. We’d laugh, we’d joke, and we’d lift, but today amongst the clamor of voices, one was missing. Eli. I particularly looked forward to his arrival. My brother and I would habitually joke to him in our “Hill-billy” voices--a habit we built during the season--which was always followed by an “Oh, shut up Cleetus” or a “Be quiet darkie.” To this day I’d never heard a name more Hill-billy than Cleetus. It never failed to induce a hearty laugh in my gut. It lightened my mood. It made the weights lighter too.

My first thought was that maybe he’d been seduced by his mattress and overslept, but that’s when my eye caught onto DC, his roommate. They’d always arrive at the same time--DC in his shorts and T-shirt ready for a pump and Eli in slippers and checkered pajama pants, but today it was just DC. He’d told us that Eli was gone when he woke up that morning. Sometimes he’d go for long drives in solitude or spend the night with his girlfriend, so one of our teammates called her.

He wasn’t with her.

Upon that we assumed he was on a drive, or sleeping in his car while the sun climbed the horizon. Maybe he’s on his way, in a feverish rush speeding down main street unable to answer his phone, and in the last second, he’d burst through the doors, sweat pebbling his forehead while his lungs wheezed in recovery from a risky sprint across a black-iced concrete parking lot. Though the latter was extremely possible, it was doubtful. My brother and I routinely arrived last. If we showed up before you, you’re not coming. But we knew we’d be back in the locker room later, ready for open gym joking with E about which punishment card he’s gonna pull or if coach would let him off the hook.

***

When Steph died I cried. Some. Homework, friends, basketball. Life doesn't stop, I couldn’t stop. I once heard a saying and it's stuck with me to this day: “Stillness is death.” Death taught me a lesson that day when I sat still and pondered on the departure of my cousin. It spat in my face, knifed my heart, and gut-kicked me with a pointy-toed shoe while I was down. It taught me that those left behind still have the burden of living. The longer I sat, the darker the thoughts. When you wallow, the reaper slips a hand over your shoulder, it gets cold, numbing almost. I sat upon my bed that day, the muffled sobs of my brother seeping through thin dorm room walls, combined with the muddy base of the same song blasting over and over, the chorus still replaying as I punch my fingertips against this keyboard: “Real ones never die they live on.” I felt confused and envious of my brother. Why cry so much? Just don’t think about it and it’ll be alright. And for a couple of days, maybe a week, I did just that. I moved about my days as if nothing occurred, but my brother, he mourned.

And mourned.

The sad songs continued to seep through to my room and at one moment I pondered: Maybe there’s a reason he’s listening to music and crying.

Me, the bed, and my headphones. I cuffed the cushioned leather over my ears and began to scavenge for a song: a song sad enough to stir up a smidge of feeling. A singular tear would be considered a success. I tapped the song and closed my eyes.

First, my heart jolted, then dropped to the bottomless depths of my gut. I felt ticklish in the eyes, pressure, a sense of impending explosion. A slight breeze wafted through my mouth, I realized my jaw was unhinged, probably because it was impossible to breathe through the nose. I felt the tickle again, this time it’s rolling across the mountainous terrain of my own cheekbones.

My body shakes?

I wonder why I’m shivering when I was just warm, but soon I come to find that trembling is a lot stronger than a shiver. I open my eyes to a blurred view of the white wall ahead, I see the blobs of saliva-infused tears edging at my chin. I know I’m wailing, pushing my vocal cords to their max tensile strength. I feel as if I’m in a dream: when my screams can’t be heard. I blast my eardrums with more pain because other people's pain oozes my own out of me. And then, after I’ve finished, I say to myself: Alright, that’s enough.

I bury the feelings. Attachment is the root of all suffering.

So detach. Be Numb.

Show nothing, do nothing, feel nothing.

***

It was agility work that day in the fieldhouse. Jumps, cuts, sprints, all the activities my coiled hips and rock-stiff ankles groaned, moaned, and crackled--literally--nonstop. In the sloppy take-offs, unfortunate slips, and occasional bouts of overthinking, I questioned whether I was truly an athlete or not, but in the water breaks and demonstrations of the next exercise, I could see coach off at the opposite end of the fieldhouse, his phone cloaked over his right ear, his feet in an unconscious gait back and forth. Back and forth.

Back and forth.

It set off an alarm in my head, a tingle of anxiety that slithered the length of my spine. I’d seen that walk before, we’ve all seen that walk before: In the mother that clutches the phone at midnight awaiting the replacement of the automated ring with her child’s voice, in the father who’s been laid off and is ransacking his brain for a solution, in the student on the precipice of an emotional eruption on finals week, in the caring coach that can’t locate a missing player…

I dismissed it and carried on. It was the off-season, and improvement of my game from all facets was the primary mover of my thoughts. Worrying about others takes you away from the now. Eli will be at open gym, stop overthinking Jon. But, somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought: I wonder where E is? I’m sure all of us thought the same…

I went about my day, went to class, finished some long overdue work, and sat back down on the aged ottoman of the mud-brown couch in my room, while my brother was off at his two o’clock. And then I got a buzz.

Those words, they nearly made my hands plunge a hole in the wall with a flying phone.

“Eli was found passed away…”

There are two types of surprise. The first is when your eyes dilate with ecstasy, a hit of dopamine you didn’t see coming. Your heart jumps, flutters, even dances. It swells and pumps joy all the through your veins, arteries, your outer extremities: An instant energy boost, the item that brings your health bar back to green just before life throws another boss battle at you, water to wilted leaves, the knock of an owner to a lonely dog. Because you got hit with such a large dose, your body has to let it out: the elastic, stretchy-lipped smile, tap dancer feet, and happy fingers that give the phone a forty-piece combo to text your friends about what just happened to you.

The other type of surprise floods you too.

With pure dread.

Because it’s so sudden, it's Potent, the lethal injection you couldn’t conceive of so your mind and body don’t have the capability to even think of or respond to something worse, and if your mind drifts off to that place, the threshold is locked off by a chain-linked, electrified fence guarded by snipers, speckled with land mines, and hidden behind a heavy coat of fog.

Dread is the black-masked assassin that sneaks through the defenses, plants the bomb, and blows the door into splinters.

The heart shrieks in fear.

Because, like the blast radius of a nuclear bomb, the collateral damage is unavoidable and soon dread will be coming to ball the heart in its monstrous fist, juice it of all its content, and drip it into its unhinged jaws.

So the heart shrivels up and in its vulnerable state, pulls all the blood back to itself, and when the blood leaves, so does your warmth, your vitality, and suddenly your skin is as cold as a vampire’s on a midnight hunt. That familiar sensation creeps back in…

Pain buried so deep you forgot where you dug its grave so it sits and allows time to do its job and decay. You don’t realize you’ve been numb until you're about to freeze again

***

An open casket funeral, my first funeral…

When I got the news that we’d be heading to New Mexico for Eli’s funeral, my feelings were mixed. I couldn’t make it to my Steph’s funeral, we were mid-season, and school was in session. Selfish. Guilty, no, much worse than that, I prayed that God would punish me for missing it, I hoped that Steph would haunt me in my dreams and wreak havoc on my mind during the day.

Selfish.

An open-casket funeral was a fitting punishment, I wouldn’t miss this one, I couldn’t miss it. My gut littered itself with anxiety, how would I bring myself to look upon a body that was just moving, smiling, laughing, and breathing just over a week ago? I packed my bag the night before we left, my airways tightening the closer I got to finishing. When I zipped the bag and laid my head to sleep for the night I imagined the moment I’d lay eyes on him and the multiple ways I could react: Tears slicking my face, a trembling mouth, weak legs, an even weaker stomach.

Or.

I stare at him, stone-faced, expressionless, cold. Numb. Could I afford to be numb around so many people? If I can’t muster a tear, am I a monster?

***

I stared at the line of people outside the church as our bus pulled up. So many people loved E, that’s good, that’s great. So many people, so much pain.

This wasn’t the funeral, this was the viewing. There was a deafening moment of silence that filled the bus like an invisible poison, a poison that rendered any and all limbs useless. Not a soul wanted to leave those seats. One of us stood up first, I couldn’t tell you who, I was too busy sweating under my clothing and trying to center myself with some diaphragmatic breathing. As if that would help. Courage is contagious, so, one by one more people stood and made their way toward the front of the bus, and when the wave reached my seat, I too stood. I don’t remember the bus being this long. That walk was a journey. Soon, my feet hit concrete and most of us had lined up behind the lines of sobbing friends and family. The air was heavy, my feet even heavier lugging along like cinder blocks that weigh tons. The closer I approached the door, the more heaving lungs, stuffed nostrils, and wailing vocal cords I could hear.

Death is literally beyond this door.

Face everything and rise: an acronym for the word FEAR. An acronym permanently etched in black on my right shoulder and mid-arm. A saying and a reminder that keeps me going when I feel at my lowest. When I saw my teammate, Will turn back to me with a hand over his mouth, water cupping his eyelids, his hands barely holding on to the earthquake happening inside his body, I wondered: Can I face this?

Fear and Numbness are partners. Lovers that have been wed together for eternity. Fear is the demon that plucks your eyes away so you can see.

That demon is you

Numbness is the nurse that sedates you with anesthesia. It knocks you out cold. You don't know who or what knocked you cold, but you’re satisfied that the pain is gone, your eyes stowed away somewhere far because not even the most numbing of medicines can stop reality.

Numbness is denial, lack of acceptance, refusal of reality.

Self-inflicted…