The Birds and Trees (Part 1)

I have been on this Earth for 23 years. That’s 289 months, 1,217 weeks, 8,551 days, 205,239 hours, 12,314,369 minutes, and at this moment 738,862,214 seconds. I do have to say looking that up and watching the seconds I’ve been alive tick by every- well, every second is unsettling. With every second ticking by I can’t help but feel like I’ve wasted every single one of them. All 738,862,346 of them. So many seconds and I’ve come to this very exact second wondering why in the hell I’ve been given so many seconds. Why do I, this individual speck of dust in the vast infinite universe, exist. More likely than not, most other human beings alive have pondered this question countless times. I honestly can’t for the life of me remember any single one of those seconds of my life that I was not in some capacity trying to figure out what it’s all for. It was at this exact second,738,862,597, that I figured it out.

I hope you didn’t expect an answer here. Instead, I think this is a good opportunity to tell a story. It’s an odd story, about an odd guy. Let me introduce you. Reader, this is Ned. Ned, this is reader. Okay, he can’t actually hear you, this is a book; these are words on a page and in reality, nobody can hear any of it. Maybe if you shout really loudly, somebody somewhere will hear you. Not Ned though, Ned will never hear you so just give up, stop trying to talk to Ned. Now you’re just an idiot shouting things at a screen at a character in a story, wondering when in the world this story is going to begin being a story. Probably contemplating why you’re wasting those ever so precious seconds reading this nonsense. Okay, okay, on with it I suppose.

Okay, I’ll give you a little background on Ned real quick. Ned was born in the spring of 1998. He was the first child of young parents, Tobias, and Marianne Elrod. They later had a daughter, Gwenn, and a son, Michael. Ned was 3 years older than his sister, and 8 years older than his brother. Ned grew up loving sports and music. He played every sport he possibly could, favoring baseball above the rest. His father, when he wasn’t working, would always happily spend countless hours outside honing in his baseball skills. Or even just throw a ball around and talk and laugh. His dad was a car salesmen, who for most of his childhood worked 40-80 hours a week. I don’t think Ned realized at the time how much he took for granted the time he got to spend with his dad.

When his dad was at work Ned lived in a whole different world inside his head. He would put on concerts to arenas filled with thousands of people from his bedroom. He would dance and sing and run around for hours. Thankfully his mother had great music taste and a wonderful collection of CDs and cassette tapes. Bryan Adams, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson; plus eventually his dad gave him his old iPod (one of the giant black rectangle ones) with bands like Journey, Wham!, AC/DC, Guns and Roses, Simon and Garfunkel. Needless to say, he grew up with a vast musical taste. He took this musical taste and put on his concerts with a fiery passion. Singing and playing every note from the depths of his very soul.

When his fans finally left, and the arena was empty Ned would just sit on the stage. He would look out and notice how much bigger and empty it felt. Sometimes he thought if he put on a better show, maybe, some people would stick around and talk with him a while. He didn’t like being alone, and when the music stopped, he felt the most alone. Even when there was no one around, the music would fill the air around him. As much as he loved putting on his concerts. Sometimes he would just sit in the empty arena and let the waves of sound wash over him. The melodies took physical form, speaking to him in a way no person ever did. Harmonies comforted him, flooded the room, and swept him up and floated him away. Hovering over the empty seats, he wondered why everyone always leaves when the shows over. He feared that people only stuck around while they were entertained, and that no one really cared about what he felt or what he had to say.

It’s at those exact moments of doubt and fear, the spirits of melody would whisper in his ear. Those spirits of the music became his only friends. The only true friends at least.

At such a young age, he had millions upon millions of complex thoughts racing through his head. Very existential thoughts for someone not even close to hitting puberty. He would often watch the way other people acted, and heavily question why everybody treated human interaction so falsely. He noticed that he couldn’t find a single person that didn’t put on a façade when around others.

He wondered if that’s the way that people were intended to live. This thought would then lead to a spiral of preschool-aged existential dread. You see, after asking himself if that’s how people were intended to live. He would stop, and say to himself, "If people were intended to live a certain way, wouldn’t that mean that somebody or something intended for them to live that way? Who could intend for the entire human species to act a certain way if not existing before humans? What existed before humans? How did we get here? Where are we going after here? Who created us?” and so on and so forth. Yes, in his earliest years of life he was already coming to the existential questions we adults all have experienced throughout our lives.

These thoughts completely consumed Ned. He would try to talk to his mother about it and she would give him a Sunday school church answer that was far too simple for his racing existential mind.

Ned would spend as much time with the spirits of music as he could. Floating around the room conversating with the one person in his life that let him exist as himself. Ned would find rest with these spirits, peace that presented itself in no other aspect of life. The more the world pushed him down, the closer he became with the music. He began to eb and flow with the music. Slowly becoming one with the spirits, finally finding a place he belonged, a place that quieted his mind. Someone he could talk to. Someone he could love and be loved by.

Whenever he tried to talk to people about the thoughts in his head he was met with judgement and responses that immediately dismissed him or silenced him because “You’re not supposed to question these things.” or “You’re too young to be worried about this stuff.” And he would just return to the spirits of music.

Ned began to spiral over the coming years from the loud outgoing bedroom arena concert performer, into a quiet, closed-off pre-teen. His vivid imagination of arena concerts faded, slowly drifting away from the spirits of music; and in their place, walls were built up inside his head that would make the world’s toughest maximum-security prison look like a broken, rusted chain-link fence around a schoolyard playground. For as long as he could remember, every time he acted transparently himself, he was shamed and looked down on and was told he was weird or different. So, he locked his true self away in this mental prison he built for himself, guarding it for dear life. It was around this time Ned began to understand that social façade everybody put on.

Now understanding that as soon as you differ from the crowd, the world shuts you up and puts you in line.

Then one night, after a nice family dinner, his parents asked Ned, Gwenn, and Michael to wait a few minutes before leaving the table. It was then that his father announced to the family, that he was leaving. Tears flowed. Questions were asked. However, while the tears continued for Gwenn and Michael, they quickly stopped for Ned. Then, he just sat there surrounded by his family, feeling completely alone, almost unsurprised that his fear came true. Nobody sticks around.

Ned began to lose interest in, well, everything. By the time he reached high school he no longer played any sports. He rarely ever listened to music, slowly distancing himself from those spirits that deceived him into thinking there was any purpose or comfort in this life. In his mind, even the spirits of music, his most beloved friend, had betrayed him and left like everyone else. There would be short bursts of times that those spirits would come back to him. It never lasted, and this just frustrated him. Everything in his life came and went with the wind, leading Ned to believe that life itself would just come and go with the wind, no rhyme or reason. Why did he get so attached to people and things if it never lasts? Even life itself just ends randomly, seemingly with no reason. So why bother participating?

Which takes us to when he was 17 years old. He had ended up failing two grades and was now a 17-year-old freshman. Which as you can imagine was quite embarrassing for him. He certainly wasn’t stupid; he was very intelligent. But as intelligent as he was, he was doubly detached from life. Somewhere along the way he made the decision that if life had no meaning and purpose, then there was no purpose in trying to become anything in this life.

This is when he decided to drop out of high school, obtain his GED, and get a job. Now, he did half of this. He dropped out and got his GED and I guess he forgot about the finding a job part. He spent 100% of his time playing Counter Strike: Source, his favorite PC game at the time. This led him to constantly be alone, with nothing but his racing thoughts he’s had his whole life: the one thing that hadn’t left him, the one thing that he wished would leave him alone. Eventually, he did find a way to quiet those thoughts down.

So, when the divorce happened, Ned and his mother, brother, and sister moved in with their grandmother. She has many chronic pain issues. With that came a nice big prescription of oxycodone. On one particularly bad night for Ned’s racing thoughts; his grandmother was in the bathroom and Ned went to the kitchen walking past her room on the way. Her light was on and sitting on her nightstand was her bottle of oxy. Ned was always fascinated by drugs, knowing they numbed your brain. He knew he felt and thought a lot and knew these pills would help subside the feeling of drowning in his own mind. He was always too scared to try it out. But, on this night that pill bottle was calling out to him, glowing in the light, calling him to the temporary salvation they provided. That night his thoughts were particularly violent and suicidal. He couldn’t think of any other way of silencing his brain and finally finding peace other than, well, the more permanent way. Not until those pills caught his eye. He went in and grabbed a handful and took two of the 10mg tablets. And finally, peace.

At first, he didn’t feel anything and started to get frustrated. Then, out of nowhere, it hit him. While playing Counter Strike like usual, a warmth flooded his body. It started in his chest and branched out and filled him up to his brain and down to his toes. It flooded the room, swept him up, and carried him away, comforting him and silencing his head, reminding him of the spirits of the music. Unlike the spirit of the music, unbeknownst to Ned, this spirit was about to chew him up and spit him out.

After that night, he started taking two every night. Two quickly turned to three, four, six and kept getting bigger. Eventually all day and all night, he was floating away with the warmth of his new best friend. Then one night his grandmother noticed her pills going missing. Ned obviously blamed Gwenn. In reality, everyone knew it was Ned. No one knew how to help him, so they didn’t, and Ned had no idea he even needed help.

Ned’s grandmother had started hiding her oxy, causing Ned to not have his new best friend around at all times anymore. Ned began to get very violent, angry, itchy, and sad, and all those racing violent thoughts came flooding back attacking him like never before, as though they were somewhere in there the whole time being held back, plotting to take their revenge the moment they got the opportunity. He started to scavenge through his grandmother’s room and purse any possible time he got the opportunity. These limited windows of time combined with the increased suspicions of his family caused Ned to improvise and make use of her many, many other prescriptions. He started taking all kinds of pills, Xanax, Vicodin, and a whole assortment of other things that he had quite literally no idea what they even were.

Now we’re going to fast forward a little bit: Christmas Eve of 2015. Every year for Ned’s whole life the Christmas Eve family get together was at his grandmother’s house and now that he lived there, it was at his house. Social gatherings made him extremely anxious. He decided to cope with it the only way he knew how.