I don’t know what else to expect from all this dissonance in my head.
It appears when I need it the least. It’s not as if I needed it at any moment, but it seems to emerge on the most inopportune instants.
In class I have to cover myself with headphones to change the frequency of my thoughts. But the dissonance is still there, out of tune with the normal, the established, the healthy.
Maybe I’m not healthy.
When I talked to my mom about this she took her purse, grabbed the car keys and drove until we reached the hospital. It was the first time I had to explain my symptoms by myself because my mom had never gotten sick with anything similar to what I felt. The diagnosis was simple: an ear infection. And the thing is that no matter how much I explained the affected area to the doctor, he was convinced that if it was a dissonance it must be in the ear.
Have you listened to music in a really high volume?
How much time do you use your headphones?
Has water gone into your ear when you have gone swimming?
The dissonance is in my head, doctor. He scowled at me and asked me to get out of his office. As he believed that my ear was the affected area he didn’t even bother to speak quietly and that’s why I could hear clearly when he commented to my mom that maybe the best would be to seek psychological help.
There I was, sitting in the consulting area in a coach with no armrest with too much shyness that prevented me from taking the tissues that were offered in the table. A stranger looked back at me waiting for me to start the conversation but nothing came out of me because everything was dissonance in that place and although they say that fire must be fought with fire I didn’t think that fighting dissonance with dissonance would be the best idea in the world.
This isn’t going to work if you don’t talk to me and tell me what’s wrong.
But sir, I’m coming here for you to tell me what’s wrong.
Because I don’t know what else to expect from all this dissonance in my head.
And every time that thought crossed my mind the feeling became more and more present.
My mom had forgotten about the issue and I tried to ignore it for a while but the dissonance got mad at me. Maybe it needed company, like me; maybe it felt lonely, like me. So the dissonance started to take more space in me because even if I didn’t need it, it needed me and wanted to take control of me and hold me tight because it had missed me and it had been looking for me for so long and it had finally found me and wasn’t thinking of ever letting me go.
It inhabited me.
And soon enough I wasn’t just feeling it in the head but also in the hands. It was a subtle sensation, and if it had happened to somebody else they'd probably had mistaken it with a simple buzz and tingle but I had been coexisting with the dissonance for so long that I had already gotten used to the signals and I knew it was it. I could move my hands, yes, but it was uncomfortable to hold pens and pencils to solve mathematical equations and to be honest now I was really angry with miss dissonance.
So then I told my mom about what I felt in my hands and she took her purse, grabbed the car keys and drove until we reached the hospital. The office was the same but the bearer of the white coat was different and looked a lot more kinder than the other doctor but he ended up being just as incompetent.
Have you been eating well?
What do you include in your diet?
Are there any past records of diabetes in the family?
That’s how I got diagnosed with a lack of vitamin B but I knew that the dissonance couldn’t care less about my nutrition not being appropriate.
I still had full mobility of my body so no one worried a lot and I went back to my normal life with the routines and the adorable monotony. I didn’t care about everyday being the same, to be honest it was quite soothing to me. The dissonance also liked it and during that time it was quiet and it behaved well but it returned at times and it blurried my mind.
I’ve gotten used to its presence, but when it decides to appear it is so heavy that it occupies too much space in my head, in my hands and it recently decided to take root in my heart.
Until one day it hit my mind suddenly that I had become the dissonance. Or maybe the dissonance had become me, I don’t know. Would there be any difference? The thing is that I started noticing that the inconveniences that at the beginning I felt when the dissonance appeared were felt now by my family when I was around. My friends didn’t save themselves from the curse either and little by little they started to drift away from me but I said what difference does it make because at the end of the day I had the dissonance with me and I knew that it would never abandon me.
But you see, one never knows what to expect from the dissonance.
I fell in love with the entanglement in my head and with the dissonance in its entirety.
And I believe what hurt me the most of all of this was when the dissonance said goodbye to me. Well, actually it never said goodbye but I like to think that it left when I was sleeping and that it gave me a soft kiss in my forehead before leaving without looking back.
Everything I had wanted was for the dissonance to go away but when it was finally gone my head sat still in silence and I simply had to start over again.
At least the dissonance was better than the vacuum.