To be.

I had found myself in a dark living room somewhere in the emptiness of New Jersey, with people I did not yet know yelling “Midnight treat! Midnight treat!” When it turned twelve, everyone fell silent waiting for something to begin.
It was about thirty of us fidgeting on the chilly floor when B- turned on a recording of a guy whose name I can’t remember, but I had heard similar stories to his before. He talked about defeat and triumph, one of those sports stories that differ from athlete to athlete, yet still stay quite the same when leaving out the five ‘W’ questions.
B- went first. Her voice, as I remember it, was quiet and gloomy but in control. She sounded strange, a voice I had never heard before, as she unfolded her story in front of a room full of strangers. She told us about her alcoholic mother, and her drug addicted father. How she had to practically raise her brother on her own. Her voice, her story, the cold floor it was all so uncomfortable and unfamiliar, it sent shivers down my spine. The girl next to me started crying, and I could hear the sniffles from those on the other side of the room. After she had finished telling her story, everyone stayed silent, not offering her a touch on the shoulder, or a hug, but just the silence of a listening ear; we stayed that way for what seemed like hours.
These stories were endless within the infinities of silence and voice, the cold breeze, and my bladder constantly asking for attention, that I could not give. K- told her story somewhere between B-‘s and mine. She is tall with blonde hair, and a smile always on her face. She lived in Detroit, with an alcoholic father and a mother who could not handle his absence. Her mother had tried to commit suicide, but thankfully they had found her soon enough to save her, after which she was hospitalized, and K- was enrolled in therapy sessions. Her relationship with her mother wasn’t always great as she described- it was a complicated one. She never really explained why she had responded this way, maybe it was personal, or maybe she didn’t know, or maybe it was too complex. She told us how one day, her mother had asked her what she talked about in her therapy sessions. K- replied, “It’s none of your fucking business”. She never really explained why she had responded this way. But afterwards she had hung up on her mother, who that day committed suicide, one from which she would not be able to come back from. After she had told us this, she shamelessly left the room.
Several stories came after hers; mine included that sounded petty and not even sad in comparison. I talked about how I had been moving from place to place every couple of year after I was born, as I moved from Georgia to Russia to Poland, back to Russia and finally to America. I told them about how we all used to live in a two-bedroom apartment with eight people, and how my dad was in Russia for the first three years after we came down to America. I told them about how I felt suffocated by my family sometimes, and how I always felt alone in a room full of people. My thoughts weren’t organized and I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell them so much, or so little. I am not one of those overly sharing kind of people. But that day, in that dark room when no one looked at my face while I talked, but just listened to my voice, I wanted to feel like a part of the whole. Of course, like all the other stories that had followed, mine was treated with the same silence except it wasn’t comforting. I felt like there were people waiting for the right moment to break it, so that they could finally get their chance to talk. And eventually it did, with a story I cannot recall.