Pyrian Keeni -- District Six [FINISHED]
Apr 8, 2012 22:28:48 GMT -5
Post by themysterybox on Apr 8, 2012 22:28:48 GMT -5
[/right][/color]Pyrian KeeniFifteenMaleDistrict Sixwhat i am
I look at myself in the mirror, every morning, to ensure that I know exactly what I am, that I haven't changed. I've never told anyone, not even Gypsy, that I do this because I'm afraid to sleep sometimes, afraid the world will fall down without me awake. Awake to what? Stop it? Yeah, right. Anyways, in this mirror I see the same thing I always do: me. Groundbreaking, I'm aware.
I like to think this me that I see is more handsome that morning than any other morning, but the truth is I look exactly the same. I'm still exactly three inches taller than the top of the mirror, an inch shorter six foot taller than the floor. Taller than the floor? Everyone's taller than the floor, why make a point of saying that? It's just-- Oh, right. How I look. I apologize if I get long-winded, I'm fascinated with how I look. I'm fascinated with how everything looks, as I know I'll never hear how it sounds.
My hair. Some areas are missing hair entirely, stray embers having floated up and burnedit out at the roots. But those are few, far between, and often heal easy enough, so it's not a big deal. The rest is somewhere between brown and blonde, depending on where you look. All of the roots, most of the top, and some of the back, are all brown, like dirt; boring and usually pretty gross. The front, sides, and tips are all blonde, but again rather drab. This morning, there are ashes throughout, still clinging for dear life after landing there last night, tiny emigrants from our fire. My hair's something to be glazed over, interesting for about thirty seconds at the most. I keep it short and out of the way, so that I don't have to see it.
My eyes, though, they are something to see. I love them; they're the greatest thing my father ever gave me. Not that there's much besides pills and empty promises vying for that title, but still, I give him credit for dealing with us. He could've gotten a lawyer to get him out of the crisis of raising children, and he didn't. But that isn't what I'm supposed to be talking about right now, is it? No. My eyes. They're beautiful, a shade of blue I've never seen in anything but the sky, an impelling color that can be very convincing when used just right. Vain though it may be, if I could, I just might stare into them forever. It may just be, though, these eyes are so unspeakably important to me, that I value them so much. They are, after all, my main connection with the silent world around me.
Behind those, though, are my ears. I hate them, with the passionate fire of a thousand suns. Since I was born, they have never worked properly, always letting in a meaningless din without provide any useful information about the outside world. Instead, these oblong flaps of cartilage (big words, right?) sit like leeches on the side of my face, giving the illusion of use but never really giving any functional or even cosmetic value. They're too large, as well, like my nose, though comparisons stop there as my nose actually works. Fancy that.
I stand almost six foot tall, and though I'm not very broad, I'm not willowy in the slightest. While not so totally muscled as a lot of the guys around, I'm still pretty solid. Not overweight, I keep in shape, and can run for long distances without too much trouble, as well as lift heavy things without breaking my spine. Usually. The rest of my body, beyond ensuring decent health, means little to me; I enjoy watching, studying, and reading faces, my own is no exception.
Clothing, though, is also something I find interesting. It says a lot about a person, about how they view themselves, and how they want the world to view them. I keep mine as nondescript as I can; not exactly in the latest fashion, but a perennially classic blue jeans/t-shirt combination that never looses its acceptability. More importantly, though, is the fact that the denim and polyester are slow to ignite and burn, giving me plenty of warning should something go awry when I'm near a fire. Despite this, I am always collecting and exchanging one burn for another, in a new place every time.who i am
Who I am is very different than what I am; it’s a distinction I always make. What I am is a boy, one who is deaf and happens to be around fire quite a bit. Who I am is deeper. I am caring, especially to those in my family, no matter what they do, who they see, where they are, where they've been. I am loyal, first and foremost to my twin, then my family, and then to the rest of the world. I am ambitious, a flames , always flickering, itching to go higher, burn brighter. There is nothing (well, within reason) I cannot do. I can't hear, but with sign language and most people in my family able to translate for me, communication has never been that much of a problem.
Except in the casual sense. If I could hear, I'd be a 'social butterfly,' as I believe the term is written. I long to be able to communicate, if not speak, with my peers, make friends and be a part of the status quo. As it stands, though, they find me inaccessible and remote, as the only way I can speak to them is through basic gestures and lip movement -- insanely ineffective with teenagers who view you and the rest of your family already as freaks. So I stopped trying a while ago, simply contenting myself with Gypsy's company and that od those who could understand me -- my family.
My biggest problem, it seems, is that I have next to no will power. When faced with a challenge, unless forced to complete every step, I will either quit or, even better, throw it into the fire. I try to concentrate on things, I really do, but often my mind finds itself thinking about the color of the sky that day, or the number of days it's been since my father forced one of those disgusting pills into me by leaving late for work.
I am afraid of just about everything that is loud, it forces me to experience something rare and very foreign -- noise. I hate loud noises, they tend to resound again and again off the sides of my skull, only stopping after they have driven me temporarily mad. Other than that, though, I don't fear much, other than violent physical contact.
Though I may hate hearing, I hate being deaf more. I know that it makes me a burden on my family, that one of them almost always has to be around to tell the world what I'm trying to say. I hate that I'm so needy, that I can never be alone. The fact that everyone's life would be that much easier if I weren't around is something I think about every day. And while I'm not suicidal, not yet, to some extent, I hate myself.[/font]
why i am
pyromania (pahy-ruh-mey-nee-uh); symptoms: Deliberate and purposeful fire setting on more than one occasion; tension or affective arousal before the act; fascination with, interest in, curiosity about, or attraction to fire and its situational contexts (e.g., paraphernalia, uses, consequences); pleasure, gratification, or relief when setting fires, or when witnessing or participating in their aftermath
I will never forget those words, so clearly printed (dare I say burned?) into my memory. Words from four years ago, when my father took my twin sister and I to a shrink, to see what was wrong with us. I didn't think there was anything wrong, really; just an affinity towards fire that most kids didn’t have. I collect matches, like to see how different things burned: paper, candles, cardboard, plastic, wood, oil, leather, the odd insect or two. Nothing too extreme, no roaring blazes or damaging infernos. Just a fire, usually outside, and almost always well-contained. Gypsy isn’t any worse; she sees images, beautiful pictures in the fires we make. That, and she can start a fire with just about anything. Is that so wrong?
Apparently. Father practically got on his knees and begged that we be given something to contain it, some kind of pill to pop every morning so that we wouldn’t ‘wreak havoc’ as he had so lovingly put it. Being a man of importance and, more importantly, wealth, he had of course been given exactly what he asked for: a joy-killing, love-stopping, dream-eating pill designed to make good little automatons of children who were ‘abnormal’. We’ve been abnormal our entire lives.
Nine months before Gypsy and I graced the world with our presence, a young man by the name of Clemson Rotz purchased a night of pleasure, for an amount of money I’d rather not think about, with Nina Keeni (read: Mom), who already had four children. I love my mother, I really do, but common sense is perhaps not a commodity she has an abundance of. After all, she has given birth to... to... I cannot even remember, at the moment, how many children she has given birth to total, but it is far too many to live in the house she has. Each child, it seems, is at least as strange as the last, and sometimes more. Then again, I've read somewhere that the truest normalcy is the greatest insanity.
I was born into a nearly-silent world. I can barely hear anyone speak, even if they speak loudly. I've heard it said (see what I did there? Because I can't actually hear? It's a figure of... oh, never mind) that most people who suffer (suffer? It's not suffering. It's lovely not to hear others' constant talking, the way I imagine it) deafness aren't completely deaf, I suppose I'm lucky that I'm not. Lucky, is the word, that I can hear a low murmur during a loud conversation, that sounds like the rumble of thunder during a storm.
My father has, to his credit, offered on several occasions throughout my life to have it fixed. I'm not sure if it's because he feels sorry for me, or if he simply doesn't want to hassle with the hand motions that have been my main way of communication throughout my life, but he has. And every time, like Julius Caesar and his crown, I have turned him down. I can hear enough to know who's speaking, if they're very loud -- enough to know the voices of my family, enough to know when I'm being spoken to. Past that, the words are unintelligible.
Aside from that, I don't know how to communicate with sound. I've never correctly heard spoken language; I wouldn't know how to communicate with it, everything would be foreign to me. Fifteen years of learning to speak with my hands, and learning to associate some lip movements with meanings, would all be worthless. I'd have to be taught to speak, to hear, to understand -- and I won't do it. I try not to have much pride, but a fifteen year old boy trying to learn his first language just sounds pathetic to me. But, enough about my hearing.
Gypsy has always been, and may always be, the most important thing in my life. My only friend at a young age, she was the only one to learn sign language with me. Both of our parents were too busy, one working and the other raising children, to really keep up with the tutor father hired, and they and the older children have really only learned enough for basic communication. She has also always been the first one to get us into things; the first of us to 'discover' fire in candles, lighters, matches, even on some screens. It was her love, I will admit, before it was mine. She was the first to figure out how to start a fire beyond a small flicker, behind our mother's house when she and I were six.
I will never forget that day -- everyone in the house was too busy to care about the two 'middle' children, and we were essentially left to our own devices. Maybe it was only fitting, then, that I would discover her discovering the device -- or perhaps motif -- that would be central in solving life's problems: fire None too far away, I saw the look in her eyes, the look that told me I was watching something... private, possibly, but absolutely revolutionary. Have you ever seen a life change? I have. And when that moment passed, I did the only thing I could think to do: I joined her.
fire not only became a hobby, or a passion, but an obsession. Unable to hear myself move about, I have never been the sneaky type; Gypsy was the one to get us matches and such from the taboos reaches of the house. From there on, though, it was a mutual thing; fires were always tended by both of us, one stepping in to keep it alive and alight if the other was off doing something they had been called away from the fire to do. Our father's neighbors always knew when his children were about, they often complained about the smell of smoke from around his house, or the shrill sound of the fire alarms going off if we had lit a blaze inside again. Our older siblings always knew when we were at mother's house in the same ways, though they were usually off doing their own eccentric thing too much to really want to complain about the fires.
Our shenanigans lasted years without serious repercussions -- a harsh word here, a slap on the wrist there, and we were right back to it. The first -- and only -- major event to come about as a result of starting fires was after we had lit the curtains on fire at Father's house (the curtains? Really? When half of the furniture had already been singed, and several knick-knacks were missing, having been sacrificed in the name of seeing how they burned), and reduced them to a very fine pile of ash. He had a field day, yelling and shouting all about, over curtains. Which brings us back to our visit with the shrink, and his 'diagnosis' of pyromania, and the pill. I knew I didn't want to take it, for sure. I just didn't know what to do with it.
Again, Gypsy lead the way. When I asked her if she were going to take it, she looked at me like I was insane. When I asked what she was going to do with it instead, she showed me -- she burned it. The irony in that never fails to make me smile.
I know what we do is questionable, worrying and even illegal, to some. To me, it is the greatest of joys, and nothing that wondrous can be bad, right? Not even if some of what we ignite was stolen from our father's lab, by the resident cat burglar -- the explosive things. I know these are the things she loves the most, I can see it in her face; her eyes. I've gotten good at reading emotions in faces, I like to think, and seeing her face all the time, it is a rare thing that I don't see some sign of an emotion pass.
There is one thing, though, that I do worry about. I will follow my sister, my family, to the ends of the earth and back, and always will. I don't only love them, I need them. But recently, I have found -- and, admittedly, joined; doesn't mean I approve -- Gypsy smoking. Where she finds the means, I don't know and have never had the courage to ask. I don't know if she knows that I know, or if I have kept it hidden that I have found out. I found her stash while cleaning our room a while back, and intrigued, thought I'd try just one. But nicotine (isn't that what's in cigarettes? I think the shrink said something about that, too, he was worried. With good reason, it seems.) doesn't work like that. It's never just one and done, not if you're as weak-willed as I am, and I fold like a house of cards.
And no, I will never be like the other kids. I will never be able to talk and sing and laugh with them. But I have my family. And they are enough.
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Odair
