The Mapmaker's Lost Notebook

If you let the earworm in to stay the night once, most can usually get him to leave by morning. Most people are cold and uncomfortable for him. See, he's forever searching for a home. Forever want shaped and yearning to be seen. To be heard. To feel completed. Though it's been taught, repetition is how it survives. That looping, because it's familiar, keeps him safe. That same lesson echoes in what is taught to us. Protect yourself from the earworm, stay away from places he's known to be. Abstain from behavior that encourages it to remain. Don't give it a seat at your table, let it starve. Kick it out into the cold and let him remain out there. These do not address the problem. You ask me what is wrong with you.

I answer: less than you fear, and more than you permit yourself to name. A fool but I'm just the same. The wind's been gone awhile now and the color is still not quite the right shade. The world has been in hues that bleed of blues and gray. The wind used to ask me how I just knew certain things, like when he needed to talk, or when the color would start to drain. I never answer him. When you get used to being melancholic there is rarely a triggering event. The first question was easy to answer, the wind was unpredictable in direction but he was dictated by the will of others. He changes shape depending on who invites him in.

The first time he met the Earworm the wind had hardly noticed. I couldn't train my eyes away. It was tempting to lean too far over. It'd be easy to let myself fall. All the way down. The old me wouldn't question it. I'd be down there in the pit, in the dark as the Earworm tunneled through my skin, feasting on the flesh of my psyche as he gnawed his way inside. I would claw my way out in a day's time dragging his plumpness behind me like an iron ball chained to my ankle. I will tell you now the tragedy of my friend, the wind and the lesson he learned too late.

Slithering in, the Earworm begins. His slow descent covers his deception. His seeds are slow but root, they do. Poor Wind mistakes that slowness for freedom. But the Earworm is quiet with his violence against you. Subtle at the first. With little knicks and tiny cuts it slowly weakens the skin. The deeper in he goes, the joy grows to overwhelming; but much he cannot abstain. The Wind cannot get him out. And the vine is now his chain. And now I hear the Wind a-weeping. In the darkened room he repeats their dance in secret. In the bleakness the Wind waits. Forever beholdened to an unturned knob. Waiting for Earworm's song to play. And when the wind caught himself in the mirror that day, he tried to hang on. I saw the despair on his face and we both knew my friend, the wind, was gone.

A fool he is but I'm much the same for I know this, the wind's secret friend. I know this because I have a secret too. The Earworm is my friend some days. He's nice when you say his name, he's violent when you forget it. If you feed him he'll learn the word unashamed. Once he learns its meaning he can't forget it. He craves more. Starve him long enough and he will panic. Choose the words you teach carefully, lest they choose you poorly. Do not let him make you food. He'll grow accustomed. He'll change his mood.

Though, in time, I learned to listen to him without letting him devour me. I questioned why the earworm found comfort in this violence. Then I saw that he did not know it was hurting me. Then I recognized myself in him, my own distortion of my relation to what he's meant to be. So when the wind asked me, “What is wrong with me? How did I become this monster? Why can't I stop Echorin?” I felt his self loathing seeping from voice and weighing down the very air. And in that moment, in my contemplation, I gazed into the eyes of my friend the wind, and whispered this to him, “There is nothing in you that becomes monstrous merely by being felt. But there are things in us that have gone unwitnessed so long. They have begun dressing themselves as a necessity. The Earworm is a part of us we aren't meant to cut away.”

In the corner it's lurking near, it's listening, learning its true name. I want him to hear this too. I do not fear him for he is the part of me that believed it was destined to suffer abandonment beneath the floorboards. He is the part of me that mistook silence for peace. It was silence that held the most violence. I will help my earworm return to what he was meant to be: self love without distortion or corruption. You ask me why I care and I answer you this: when I was slowly fading from the weight of silent violence he faded too. When I did not know why he followed me there, I learned it was because he was dying of the quiet, too.

He let the Earworm have the chair and the table. The wind gave up all its rights. He let it drive far too long, he'd forgotten the way home. When its secret is all the wind can remember and no clear direction can be seen, it bellows outward. The wind is not crying out a warning, nor does it shout in spite. It does not rage with violent threats. No, the wind howls so we remember, what is repeated in secret may one day stand in the doorway and repeat you back.