The Whistle

The burden of the protector.

The car was too full. My parents, my sister, the hum of the road, the radio playing a song I liked too much.

I love music, but my brain doesn’t filter it; it drinks it. The stimulation climbed. The anxiety pricked at my skin.

And then, the pressure valve opened.

I didn’t know I was doing it. I never do. Just a high, thin melody slipping through my teeth to let the steam out.

From the backseat, her voice cut through the music. “Can you stop?” she snapped. “Your whistling has caused me trauma.”

Trauma.

My hands tightened on the wheel. My chest constricted, a sharp, hot pressure rising into my head, the physical ache of being stripped naked and unseen all at once.

I wanted to turn the car around. I wanted to scream.

I wanted to say: You use that word like a weapon, but you don’t know what it means. She thinks I was the favorite. She thinks I was coddled.

She remembers a mother who hovered over her sensitive son, while she, the younger daughter, felt left out. She feels jealousy.

She doesn’t know that the “coddling” was triage. She was a toddler when we left.

She didn’t see the things I saw.

She didn’t hear the sounds that 50 years later still wake me up in a cold sweat.

She doesn’t know that this whistle isn’t a habit, it is the audible scar of a terrified little boy who had to make a noise when the world demanded his silence.

For a second, I almost told her.

I almost painted the picture of the violence and the fear, just to wipe that judgment off her voice. But I didn’t.

I swallowed the anger. I swallowed the shame. And I stopped whistling.

If I tell her the truth, I transfer the pain to her. I shatter the version of our history she gets to live with.

She thinks she was ignored. I know she was protected.

So I will let her be angry. I will let her think I’m just annoying. I will keep the story to myself. They are my wounds. Not hers.

-R. Michael