Things he had always taken for granted had become challenges anew upon arriving at this wasteland that had now become a home to him. Growing food. Preparing it. Repairing leaks.
In his solitude he had developed a habit of unconsciously talking to himself, if for no other reason than to contrive a semblance of companionship, no matter how illusory. For a while he had even tried creating different personalities, inventing complete conversations as the long days dragged on and on, but inevitably concluded that he was a hopelessly inadequate schizophrenic and abandoned the whole affair, persisting only in a form of self talk - reasoning aloud, asking rhetorical questions, and such.
Over the years, his tendency to mutter grew more and more pronounced, as his syllables, stringing themselves together, grew less and less so. After all, why speak up and enunciate when there is no one around to understand or misunderstand you? To praise or to scold you? To even hate or to love you?
One never knows how dependent he is upon feedback - a nod here, a raised eyebrow there, a simple request to repeat oneself. In the absence of such simple mechanisms, atrophy was actually quite natural and gradual. So gradual was the deterioration of his speech that he hardly even noticed the change -- how he lazily swallowed the words before they came out, how he sometimes didn't bother to actually open his mouth or even vocalize for that matter. At times, his speech could be better characterized as mime accompanied by nasal breathing than actual speech in any conventional sense of the term.
This had only recently come to his attention, however, three months ago when a new officer came for the traditionally impersonal shelter inspection and delivery of the meager quarterly allowance of resources upon which he was to base his survival for the next 90 days. For the first time in years -- he simply couldn't believe his ears -- a person had spoken to him! Not like a dog or a wild animal but instead as a person!
The shock was almost immobilizing. In that split-second in which a normal conversationalist replies to such niceties, he suddenly realized that he had almost rather forgotten how to talk in such a manner as to be heard. He now shook his head trying somewhat unsuccessfully to avoid thinking about how absurd and savage he must have looked on that day, as he grunted an incomprehensible reply like the wide-eyed, caged animal that he had always feared he would become.
Come back on 1/24/98 for the Next Chapter!
Chapter 4 is Now Here!
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