I’ve Lived My Whole Life Without Ever Hearing Music

They pull me down the hallway to my bedroom and shove me inside hard enough that I stumble and hit my knee on the bed frame. Dad points at me and his hand is shaking.

Mom slams the door and I hear the lock click from outside. It is the one they installed last year that only opens from the hallway.

I sit on my bed and touch my neck where the cord left a mark. The house is quiet for maybe 30 seconds, then I hear their voices start up in the hallway right outside my door.

They’re trying to whisper, but Mom keeps getting louder, and I catch words through the wood: deprogramming, intervention, before it’s too late. Dad says something about neural damage and Mom responds with “infected.”

I press my hands over my ears even though I can still hear them. They argue for what feels like an hour, their voices rising and falling.

I lie back on my bed and stare at the ceiling and feel strangely calm about everything. I listened to music, real actual music, and they can’t take that away no matter what they do to me now.

The melody plays in my head on repeat, and I mouth the words I remember. The calm feeling stays even when I hear Mom crying in the hallway.

The lock clicks and Dad comes in carrying his big notebook, the one where he keeps all his theories. He sits in my desk chair and makes me sit up straight on the bed facing him.

For the next four hours, he lectures me about music and brain damage and corporate mind control. He flips through pages of diagrams he’s drawn showing normal brains as organized circles and music-damaged brains as tangled messes of lines.

He explains how sound waves at certain frequencies literally rewire neural pathways and destroy critical thinking abilities. He shows me charts about dopamine manipulation and addiction cycles.

He talks about how corporations use music to make people docile and easy to control, and how every song is carefully designed to shut down the logical parts of your brain. I nod when he pauses and say I understand when he asks if I’m following.

Inside my head, I’m replaying those ten songs and knowing everything he’s saying is complete nonsense. His diagrams are just circles and scribbles, his theories are paranoid fantasies, and the music I heard was beautiful, not poisonous.

But I keep nodding, and I write down the key points he tells me to write down. I watch the light outside my window fade from afternoon to evening while he keeps talking.

When he finally leaves, my hand is cramped from writing and my head hurts from holding two opposite truths at the same time. Mom brings dinner on a tray an hour later.

She sets it on my desk without looking at me, like if she makes eye contact, she’ll see that I’m already gone, already lost to the poison. The food is the same as always, but she’s cut everything into small pieces like I’m five years old.

She walks around my room picking up my books from the shelf and stacking them by the door. My journal goes on top of the stack, then my sketch pad, then the three novels I was reading.

She takes the poster off my wall, the one of mountains I’ve never seen, and rolls it up tight. When she’s done, my room looks empty and sad, just the bed and desk and bare walls.

She tells me without looking at me that distractions will only make the deprogramming harder and that I need to focus on cleansing my mind. Then she picks up the stack and leaves, locking the door behind her.

I eat the dinner slowly, chewing each small piece and thinking about how they really believe this. They’ve built their whole lives around being afraid of something that made me feel more alive than anything else ever has.

After I finish eating, I lie on my bed with nothing to do except replay those ten songs and Dad’s nonsense diagrams. I realize the songs are stronger, clearer, and more real than anything he tried to teach me.

Morning comes and I hear the lock click. Mom and Dad stand in my doorway and announce the new rules.

I’m not allowed downstairs unless one of them is with me. Bathroom breaks have to be supervised, which means knocking and waiting for Mom to come unlock the door and stand outside while I’m in there.

They’re installing a better lock on my bedroom door, one that takes a key instead of just sliding. Dad lists each rule in his calm lecture voice while Mom nods along, her arms crossed tight over her chest.

Miles is behind them in the hallway looking uncomfortable, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Micah pushes past Miles to see what’s happening, and his eyes are huge and worried.

He asks if I’m going to die from the music poison, his voice small and scared. Mom tells him no, that they caught it early enough, but he needs to stay away from me until I’m better.

Micah backs away, and I see him looking at me like I’m already a different person, someone dangerous. Miles won’t meet my eyes at all.

Dad finishes explaining the rules and they leave. I hear them working on the door from outside, the sound of a drill and metal scraping.

When they test the new lock, it makes a solid click that sounds more final than the old one. I sit on my empty bed in my empty room and count the hours until they bring lunch.

The next three days blur together into one long stretch of silence and isolation. Dad comes in twice a day for lectures, showing me the same diagrams over and over and explaining the same theories about neural damage and corporate control.

Mom brings meals on trays three times a day and never speaks, just sets the food down and leaves. They make me write essays about the dangers of music, about how corporations use it for mind control, and about why families need to protect themselves from sonic pollution.

I fill pages with exactly what they want to hear, writing about corrupted brain waves and the importance of silence. My hand cramps from holding the pen, and my eyes hurt from staring at blank paper trying to come up with new ways to say the same lies.

But while I write their propaganda, my brain plays those ten songs on an endless loop. I remember every note of the guitar, every word the woman sang, and every beat of the drums.

The music is clearer in my memory than Dad’s face during his lectures. At night, I lie awake humming the melodies so quietly even I can barely hear them.

The songs are the only thing keeping me from screaming at the walls. On the third day, I start to feel separate from my body, like I’m watching myself from somewhere else.

I am watching this girl write essays and nod along and pretend to believe things she knows are insane.

The Vibrations of Truth

On the fourth day, I wake up to shouting outside. I get up and look through my window, careful to stand to the side so no one sees me.

Mom is in the neighbor’s front yard, her arms waving around as she yells at a woman about my mom’s age. The woman has dark hair pulled back and she’s wearing jeans and a sweater, and she looks confused and concerned.

Mom is yelling about noise pollution and deliberately poisoning our family and how they need to stop their evil music right now. The woman tries to say something, but Mom talks over her, getting louder and more frantic.