eight || leocadio torrell schwa

When I was very young, my momma was my best friend. We did everything together for all of the time that I could remember. Our little family of two wasn't exactly the most well off in terms of wages, nor were we the worst. We tended towards the former, though, and momma had to work everyday just to get us by. Still, it always seemed like there was something wrong with her. Momma was never quite the same as everyone else. Most everyone didn't pay her any mind. She hardly ever spoke to people other than me and chose to spend her every waking moment with me for always and forever. Momma never had any friends of her own, but she said she never needed them because she had her main man to be there for her. I always knew she was talking about me. There was no other main man for her to have. Pops took off when momma was still pregnant with me, so I was the only man in her life really, even when I was just barely old enough to breathe on my own. It was always me and her. I wish it still was.

Momma wasn't the only one that was different. I never realized this until I was a little older. By older, I mean seven years old. I looked like momma to a scary degree, had inherited nearly all of her traits and characteristics. It's strange looking into a mirror and seeing my mother so clearly in the subtle squint of my almond-shaped nearly black eyes, the quirk of my thin lips, the flare of my nostrils. It's visible in the way I stand tall and walk fast and sit crumpled up as if I couldn't get smaller. It's even in the lilting of my voice. It terrifies me that I'm so like her, because I know what will become of me in the end. Then again, it already has come upon me.

Momma, for as long as she could remember and for as long as she had lived, was invisible to most everyone. They simply didn't see her. She would pass people in the street and smile softly to herself, tugging me along, and no one would see. Very few people seemed to believe she existed at all, only acknowledging her presence if she went out of her way to speak to them, like she would when her employer would forget she worked for him and not pay her on time; like when they tried to sell our house for being abandoned; like when Pops left because she wasn't even a memory in his head. Momma simply couldn't be seen, not for a moment of her life, and everyday I feared that I too would forget her in time. I was so scared of losing her that I clung to every moment we had, trying to internalize every second and make it everything I was and would be. She was the most important person in the world to me and I loved her more than air itself.

And then, one day, I couldn't see her anymore. The marketplace of District Eight had always been busy, but it was especially crowded that day. A new shipment of grain had come in and practically every family had come to get their share, many in return for tessera. Momma and I had just gone to get some new oil for one of our lamps. It shouldn't have been the hassle it was to worm through the market, squeezing between unfeeling bodies and unseeing eyes. We had always been good at finding the gaps to push through, exploiting the power invisibility afforded momma. The market was rife with desperation that day and we were left to push through the remnants of peace to try and find the other side. Over by the oil merchant, there was hardly a soul. Who needed light when food was finally available after a long period of shortage? For just a moment, momma left me to fight through the throngs of people to reach the meat counter and buy what she could. I watched her on the outskirts, immediately feeling uneasy when she became one with the crowd of people. That was the last I saw her.

I waited for hours, tiny hands clasped around a container of oil in the hopes that it would ignite and reveal momma to my eyes again. She was invisible, even to me then. My voice cried over the crowds, screaming for momma to come out, to stop hiding, to let me see her. Tears rolled down my cheeks and dropped to the ground, but no one saw. I sobbed and begged for help, shrieking at the top of my lungs. Perhaps then momma would appear and sweep me into her arms and tell me to stop my worrying. She would tell me that everything would be alright and that there would be no need to cry while she was around. She didn't. I stood there, numb and bubbling with hiccups, trying to make sense of why I couldn't see her. There was a rule against that, no? Family could always see family, no matter whether one was invisible or not. Then how could I not see her? Surely she must have been trying to make me see her. Perhaps we were living on borrowed time, on borrowed happiness. It was time to start paying the debts back, tear by painful year.

In all of my time spent weeping there like a pathetic rag-doll, not once did someone glance my way. People continued to flow past me in their hurries to stock up on supplies while they lasted. Children ran past in unorganized games of tag. Table-owners continued to call out prices to potential customers. In the middle was me, lost and utterly alone, my mother having vanished from not only my sight, but the world's. It was then that I learned what it was truly like to be invisible. To be truly invisible is to be completely, utterly alone without even the chance of salvation at the hands of another. Not a soul looks your way, nor pays you any mind, as you cry out in anguish over the hopelessness of your own human condition. It is a dreadful existence to lead as a child of only seven years old, freshly exposed to the reality of my own loneliness. There is an absolute emptiness in the world that cannot be understood until one is utterly lost in the masses.

When all of my tears seemed to run dry and leave my eyes feeling like scratchy sheets against the backs of my eyelids, I was unable to think. How is a seven year old supposed to respond to finding himself alone in a market while it is closing without a single person knowing he is there? I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know how to react to my sudden graceless tumble from the cliff of dependency into the airs of independence. No clouds eased my fall from my life with my momma into life without her. The sky was stormy and dark and sent me reeling in the depth of its sadness. There was no period of time in which I was allowed to learn how to ween myself off of her care little by little. I took no lessons in the art of becoming independent of my childhood prior to being forced out of it callously. No, I was shoved without having first tested my wings and expected to be able to fly- or crash. I did the latter first.

Crashing was much easier than flying, especially within my first week on my own in the world of invisibility. I had always been invisible, but I had never been invisible on my own. I had never been by myself in the world, fending for myself to survive. Everything I needed to do in order to live was obvious. The first directive was to get home. But where was home? Momma had always been the one to guide us and I never quite paid attention how to get to and from places. Considering my first order was a complete failure, the second and third were as well: finding food and water. I had no money to myself. The only thing of worth I held was the container of oil, but even that wasn't a very good bargaining chip. For my first night alone, I fell asleep inside the market amid the hearty laughter of pleased merchants. The nights following were much the same; stomach empty, body tired, head muddled. I was usually woken by people tripping over my or screaming loudly about needing to move shipments. It was always a noisy place, no place for a child to try and live.

A child is supposed to live in a home. It is supposed to have a family and friends and love in order to truly live and thrive. I had nothing. I had no family nor friends nor love nor even a house to live in now that I couldn't figure out where I lived. To be lost in the throngs of people daily, just me and my oil, was infuriatingly frustrating. Each day, I felt my anger simmering in my stomach, building slowly to a boiling rage. Why couldn't anyone see me and help me? Not a single person recognized my struggle as a need to live. Instead, I was passed by. I was left to cry in the corners clutching all I had left of my mother, a stupid container of oil for a lamp I would probably never see again. Surely, I would never find my way home. Perhaps someone had finally managed to take it away from momma anyway. They did always seem to forget we lived there. I just wanted my home and my momm and my own feet carried me in circles until one day I couldn't walk any farther and I ran.

I ran after giggling children, watching their ruddy faces bloom in smiles and laughs. Every step led me farther and farther away from the market, grass bursting under my feet in spurts of green and a large house coming into my view. It was a community home. It was a place for those who had been lost and left without a thing in the world to love or care for them, and I had somehow managed to find it. I cautiously toed into the house, somehow still afraid to be seen as if I was entering a place I shouldn't be. There was no reason to be scared of being seen. They didn't even notice me among the crowd of whining children and morose teens. I wasn't even a face in the crowd to them. I was nothing.

When night came, I snuck down into the basement of the busy house amid the screaming of intolerant children denying their need for sleep. The angry calls of impatient caretakers followed soon after, noise echoing across the walls in a symphony of disharmony. With a quick tug, the door closed behind me firmly and then all of sound dulled. I descended the stairs, moving quickly to find a place to settle down for the night. It wasn't an ideal place to sleep, but it was exponentially better than sleeping in the market like a street urchin. Still, it was ungodly dark and chillingly damp and it made me feel even more invisible than I already felt. I couldn't even see myself in the blackness of the basement, hands searching blindly for what I was. I was a shapeless mass of skin and bones, tired and sagging out of frame in exhaustion. My every step drew me further into the embrace of sleep until I was curled upon the bare floor, face pressed to the cool stone as I drifted off.

From then on, I had a routine. I would wake up when the plodding of feel sounded from above my head and sneak up to the small dining room to grab what little food I could. The caretakers could hardly afford food enough for a few of the children, not to mention the rest of them. I ate a minimal amount to survive, grabbing maybe a small square of cheese or a corner of a slide of bread. I took so little that I must have been considered a mouse, if only they could see me. I did the same for every other meal as well. On the rare occasion when we could afford meat, I would steal away the bones to pick at and suck on for days. Just to have the flavor of it was enough to fill me on most days. The thin soups made from boiled vegetables were less than appetizing, a mere concoction of water and slight flavoring. There was nothing much to eat and I grew up skinnier than a twig with all of my bones sticking out, but as tall as a tree. I used to measure myself up against the door frame in comparison with the other children, pleased to find that I was level with the tallest boy at six feet and one inch.

Most days, I followed the boys to school, something momma had never been able to afford to me. I was able to slip my name onto the roll sheet at the beginning of the year when I was ten, three years after I started to sneak into class. The teacher still didn't call my name, no matter how boldly or largely I scrawled it across the sheet of paper. Some days, it frustrated me so completely that it sent me into a fit of tears. Still, no one noticed. I shouldn't have been surprised, but yet my own condition shocked me. How could it be that I was so completely invisible to the world that not even my cries could turn them toward me, could make them see me? I wanted to know so badly it hurt, but how could I ever figure it out unless someone saw me? I had no knowledge to work from, no data to collect. Instead, I took it little by little and learned what I could in school.

I spent long nights with books slipped out of the local library and an oil lamp snuck from the upstairs living room. For hours upon end, I would curl up in the corner of the basement in a tangle of blankets I had stolen from my housemates's beds and a pillow taken from my caretakers. They wondered where everything was going for a while before assuming one of the other boys was taking them and selling them to other needy kids out on the street for a small profit. I didn't have the care in me to even object to his false accusation at my expense and went on taking advantage of what I could in the house. I had quickly gone through the collections of nursery rhymes and children's stories and moved on to bigger and better things. Mostly, I read science. Science, I heard in school, was the key to figuring out the things that were a mystery. Once, man had not known how to heal the sick or to fly in large aircraft, but science had allowed them to discover how to change things and advance. I wanted to change my fate more than anything, to figure out why people couldn't see me and how I could make them.

There are no new books left to read now, though. My dark eyes have grown cold and withdrawn, lifeless. I'm detached from the world, especially now that I have begun to lose hope in ever finding a solution for my functional invisibility. My black hair contrasts my pale skin from sleepless nights wasted on the idea of finding a cure. How can one solve such a thing when it is not even known to the world at all? It is invisible. I am invisible. Tomorrow, I will wake when the house wakes again. I will eat a small amount. I will go to school. I will go to the library. I will go home. I will eat again. I will read over a book for the twentieth time in the hopes that maybe the words that I need are hidden just like I am. Then, I will give up and sleep, because I will be invisible for all of my life, just like momma. Just like momma.