From the earliest days of my life, I was haunted—though I did not know it then—by a peculiar affliction, or perhaps a curse, depending on one’s perspective. It was not a physical ailment, no. It was something far more insidious, far more pervasive. I could hear the thoughts of others.
At first, I thought it to be a peculiar gift. After all, who would not wish to know what others truly thought? But as I grew older, I realized the tragic absurdity of it all. The minds of those around me were not the harmonious symphony I had imagined. No, they were a maelstrom, an endless and cacophonous jumble of nonsensical fragments, erratic desires, and jumbled, twisted concepts. What others called “thoughts” were, to me, a perpetual stew of confusion—a mess of fragmented and incoherent words that had no meaning or connection.
The agony of this was unbearable. People’s minds were like labyrinths without a map, leading me down paths that ended in dead-ends or looping back upon themselves, leaving me lost in a sea of noise. Conversations became nothing but frustrating puzzles. A single sentence from someone could splinter into a thousand contradictory ideas: “Yes, I’ll meet you at 7,” would bleed into “But I’d rather stay home,” and then fray out into “I hope she doesn’t show up” and “What am I going to have for dinner?”
I had learned to shut it all out, to turn inward and drown out the madness. But it never stopped. The voices, the thoughts, they were always there, swirling beneath the surface like a river of chaos, and I could never escape it.
Until the day they stopped.
It began innocuously enough. I woke that morning with the usual hum of a thousand disjointed thoughts rattling in my head. Yet, something was wrong. The usual clutter of disarray that accompanied every conversation, every passing glance, every mundane encounter—had vanished.
For the first time in years, I stood in a crowd and heard… nothing. No stray thoughts fluttering at the edges of my perception. No incoherent mutterings hiding beneath the words of the people around me. It was as if the world itself had fallen silent.
Confusion settled upon me, a heaviness pressing down upon my chest. I tried to speak to a stranger passing by, but no thought echoed in my mind to guide my words. I could no longer decipher their intentions or understand the unsaid. The silence was absolute, and I felt a creeping dread that this silence was no accident. It was unnatural, like an ominous void had swallowed the essence of communication.
And then, a voice.
A single, piercing thought shot through the silence—a thought so clear, so precise, it could not be mistaken.
“Run.”
It was not the scrambled noise of the usual, jumbled mess of human minds. No, this voice was sharp and urgent, as though it had been waiting for a moment such as this to reach me. I froze. There was no question—no room for ambiguity in those words. It was a command. The message was simple, but the implications were profound.
“Run.”
I stood still in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the distant horizon, feeling the weight of the instruction press upon me. Run from what? Run from whom? The confusion that had been my constant companion seemed to pale in comparison to the singularity of this moment.
The silence held. The world continued to move around me, unaware of the internal storm that had just erupted within me. I glanced around, and it was then I noticed the junk removal truck parked by the curb. It was an odd, almost surreal sight. The truck, with its battered logo, a symbol of professional junk removal—”Same day junk removal. No job too small or too large,” the side of the truck read—seemed entirely out of place in this moment of disquiet.
The voice in my mind surged again: Run.
Something about the truck, something about the message it conveyed, struck a chord deep within me. I understood, or thought I understood: perhaps it was the idea of discarding things, of clearing away the debris that cluttered one’s life—thoughts, memories, even the very essence of one’s existence. Junk removal. The more I thought of it, the more it felt connected to something far darker than the mundane task of clearing out a forgotten basement.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered if the silence had somehow removed more than just the voices of the world around me. Had it also erased some part of my own understanding, a part that had allowed me to make sense of the madness? Or had it cleared the way for something more sinister? The truck, with its strange advertisement of quick and professional service, now felt like an omen.
“Run.”
This time, I did not hesitate. I turned and fled down the street, feeling the cool air whip past me as my legs carried me further from the truck, from the silence, from the overwhelming weight of the command that seemed to echo within me. My heart pounded, my breath came in sharp gasps, and still, the command did not stop—Run.
I had no destination in mind, no place to go except further away from the source of the call, that deep, unsettling need to flee.
As I turned a corner, I saw the junk removal truck once more, parked in the alley, its doors swinging open as men in uniforms began to unload and clear away discarded items. They moved methodically, clearing debris, pulling away refuse as though it were simply another day of work. The world had returned to its normal state of noise and confusion, but I could still hear the lingering call.
“Run.”
But now, I understood. The voices had always been there, swirling like forgotten junk in the minds of others, and now, in this final moment of clarity, I realized that I, too, had been just another piece of discarded junk, a memory to be forgotten, a soul to be cleared away.
The question that remained, as I stood there, breathless, watching the men remove the remnants of discarded lives, was whether I was running from something that was trying to clear me away—or whether I was running toward something, something I could not yet see, but could feel lurking in the silence, waiting for me to open my eyes.
As the last of the junk was carted off into the truck, and the city returned to its ceaseless hum of thoughts and voices, I found myself wondering: Had I just witnessed the clearing of the last remnants of a life that could never be reclaimed? Or had I, in my frantic escape, simply become another discarded thought, forever lost in the rubble of forgotten things?
The answer, like the junk removal truck itself, remained elusive, hidden behind the walls of my own mind.
And the voices? They were gone.
