Silence

The first time I ever really encountered silence, I was seven years old. What I found intriguing wasn't the lack of any sound but the deafening weight of everything that wasn't said. My father had just slammed the front door, the force of his anger yet still rattling through our small apartment, while my mother stood frozen at the sink, her hands shaking, her knuckles white on the cold stainless steel.

I can recall the sound of a faucet drop, just like the invariable rhythm of this weird clock, which counted the seconds of that eternal instant. Drip. Drip. Drip. With every drop, words we didn't say, tears we didn't spill.

That night, the understanding finally dawned that silence is a weight, a presence in the room that can muzzle the entities inside it. It was the night when I clutched a pen for the very first time, determined to fill up that silence with words of my imagination.

Grown between skyscrapers in Brooklyn, it could hardly be perceived whether I was big or important. Our neighborhood was a quilt-one of those patchworks of defeated dreams and desperate hopes of hanging in there. The almost continual wail of sirens, punctuated by the intermittent crackle of gunfire, was the soundtrack for my childhood symphony.

When present, my father was a whirlwind or a storm, whose moods were about as predictable as the shifts in the wind. We, therefore, learned to live our lives trying to predict what the old man's mood would be like next. He'd tousle my hair and call me "champ" one day, his eyes bright with pride, while on another day, his eyes would cloud over with disappointment, and his words cut deeper than any physical blow.

She was the eye of this storm-the no-storm center, a place where everything is still. My mom moved through our lives with the silent ease of a ghost, always there, never really there. Her smiles were streaks of shooting stars across the night sky. I tried for years to catch them, to hold and understand them.

School was both sanctuary and the field of battle. I dove headfirst into the world of books, finding refuge in the worlds others built. The playground, though, was a different matter altogether: short, shy, and a bully's dream come true-I learned early how to run fast and to hide well, lessons serving me in good stead as I forged into my own adulthood.

It wasn't until Mrs. Abernathy, my fourth-grade teacher, first took notice of my scribbled stories. One afternoon, she pulled me aside and peered up at me over the rim of her glasses with her warm brown eyes. "Ellis," she softly yet firmly said, "you have a gift. These words... They're special. Never stop writing."

These had been the words cast out as a lifeline to a drowning child. I clung on to them, grasped them, and wrestled the powerful tides of my childhood with them. In that unyielding world, writing became my refuge and my translator.

The silence in our house just got louder as I grew up. Father's absences grew longer-in between home-comings, less predictable. Mother withdrew further inside herself, her once bright being fluttering like a flame struggling against the wind.

Of it all, I wrote through: full of stories, poems, and pieces of thoughts in note upon note. I created worlds wherein fathers would never be savage, mothers could always laugh un-restrainedly, and where children would never be afraid of the dark.

I must have been sixteen when I'd won some sort of citywide writing competition. The prize was a modest sum of money and publication in a small literary magazine. I ran down the sidewalk toward home, carrying the magazine clutched to my chest.

I found my mother at the kitchen table, a crumpled letter tightly clutched in her hand. When she looked up at me, that spark was there that had been gone for so long; there, in her eyes, a spark alit. "He's gone," she said in a soft voice. "Your father. He is never coming home."

In that instant, the silence that had long defined our lives came crashing down. My mother's sobs wrapped themselves around the apartment-an anguished echo from the depths of some bottomless well. I held her close and let her cry, my tears mingling with hers. The magazine lay forgotten on the floor, my moment of triumph swallowed up in this life-shaking event.

The years that followed were tough yet therapeutic. My mom and I learned how to quell the silence with our voices. We spoke, laughed, and cried, but through it all, I wrote.

My words had been my passport out of Brooklyn. A scholarship to an Ivy League school was followed by a job with a publishing house. Then the book contracts came streaming in, each more successful than the last. I was Ellis Elms - the best-selling author, writing raw, emotional stories that cut to the heart of the human condition.

Interviews would always digress on to my past, into what had inspired me to weave such emotionally charged tales. I would relate stories of a traumatic childhood, battles fought and overcome, of silence revised into words. The story of little Ellis, that boy who began writing to get a voice, started to parallel the fame of my novels.

And now, dear reader, while surrounded by all the trappings of success, I am overcome by the need to have one last secret spill to you, perhaps one I have kept from myself for decades.

The story that I have just told you? It isn't real.

Welcome to The World of Ellis Elms.