His screams reminded me of another kid I once cared for.
I remember the other boy: he weighed scarcely 70 pounds at age nineteen. The boy would have seizures every so often, and when we would pick him up, he would scream this blood-curling, miserable scream. It was so pained, so helpless, so...oh god, just make it stop.
The boy's family had left him in a nursing home in the hope that he would die soon and out of sight, at least that's what I figured. I never saw them. All I knew was their address, which was enough: they had money, and lots of it. After picking the kid up a few times, I made a habit of jutting my head into the front of the ambulance on the way to the hospital and telling my partner to drive as fast as possible.
I couldn't take it. I just, I couldn't take the sound, the gut-wrenching, sad sound, the solemn wailing, the agonized shrieks of empty, lonely pain. Of all the things I'd seen, of all the shootings, all the abused children and beat-up mothers, of all the dead and all the dying, this kid, this one, miserable, decrepit teenager was the one I couldn't handle.
My mother was bipolar. When I was a kid, she would wake up at 3am and scream these terrible, ear piercing screams. We all felt sorry for the neighbors because we knew they could hear it and that it must have bothered them, that it must have chilled their soul to hear. When I was a little, I would run to her, I would try to help her and make it all better. It worked sometimes, but the fix was fleeting, even then I knew that.
It was the memories of those years, the shrouded association of scream with scream and the subsequent displaced pain that the boy evoked. Those screams readied me for this life, for the madness of the streets. They steeled me, made me hard and cool in the face of grief, pain and psychosis alike. But every once in a while, something--like the screaming--reminds of that past which tempered me, and I am shaken by it.
Sometimes, I just, I just want to make it stop, please god, make it stop.
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