Jody

   Jody was seventeen years old the first time he heard his own thoughts. Having grown up in the heart of Brooklyn, quiet was a thing unknown to him. Every second there was the sound of cars, people, or sirens; a constant swirl of penetrating noise that never ceased. With noise persistently making its way into his head, Jody could only analyze those external sounds. There was never time to hear what his own mind was trying to say, or what his heart was saying. It seems banal to talk about listening to one’s heart, but that is because many are afforded the luxury of having that ability and therefore take it for granted. But Jody grew up unaware of solitude.

   Nothing about him stood out. He dressed like everyone else, listened to the same kind of music, was a good athlete but only played sports because his friends did. He followed trends and followed people and was never one for competition because he had no desire to be compared with other people. Just being a person among other people in a school was all he lived as.

   His friends were mostly the same. And their relations might not even be accurately described as friendships because they weren’t as personal as a friendship should be. The connections did not quite exist as human-to-human; they just existed. Jody and some other boys had simply accumulated over time and their crew was formed. They were a crew and they spent time together because they did and it was routine. And those were about the deepest connections Jody had to anyone other than his mother and father, whose relationships to him were not very close either.

   He would spend time with girls on occasion because he was a smooth texter, but most realized on the first encounter that he was empty in a way and they wouldn’t want to go out with him a second time. But this never bothered him. He was fine because he never really had much interest in his relations with girls. He just did it because that was what boys did and that’s what he would talk about with his crew.

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            To sum it up, Jody did not stand out and was very, very average.

            On his seventeenth birthday, Jody’s parents surprised him with a weeklong trip to Cape Cod. To Jody this wasn’t a great gift and he had no desire to leave his routine life in the city, but his parents had already booked a cottage so he couldn’t say no.

            The drive was long and boring, which was expected when five hours are spent staring at the screen of a phone. Jody felt relief at the sight of the large hedge spelling “Cape Cod” at the end of the Bourne Bridge, only to have his hopes of arrival crushed by his mom, who told him it was still about an hour to Truro where they would be staying. Driving around the roundabout that followed, Jody saw something he’d never seen before. In every direction he could see trees and grass and some sort of vegetation. Of course he’d seen trees in parks and along streets in the city, but always with a backdrop of tall buildings. This was the first time the tallest object in sight was natural. He put down his phone.

            For the rest of the ride, Jody watched his window. He watched the world that existed. Beyond his school and his friends, beyond people he knew, there was life here that lived independently from him and uninterested in him. Nothing he saw was new, but it was all new to him.

            Despite his revelations in the car, Jody spent the first few days on the beach playing games on his phone and listening to music not suitable for the beach. Certain music is very acceptable, but hearing Drake repeat in auto-tune he is the greatest ever does not quite match warm sand and the vast Atlantic. Jody hardly went in the water because it was “too cold” and he didn’t find it comfortable. At night he and his parents would go out to eat—and never too adventurous of a meal—and they would go back to the cottage and Jody would turn the TV on to something sufficiently entertaining to watch.

            The fifth day went the same until they got back from dinner. There was a note on the door from the caretaker stating there was some circuit problem and the power would be out until an electrician could come in the morning. It was only 8:30, too early for bed. Jody’s phone was dead from a full day of use and without electricity there was no way of charging it. His mom suggested he walk down to the beach and with no other options, he did. Their cottage was on the bay side so when Jody got to the beach, the water was still. Across the bay, following a shimmering orange reflection, he could see the light at the top of the Pilgrim Monument in Province Town. Down a ways to the left he saw the searching beam of a lighthouse, which marked the end of Cape Cod. Continuing left in his sight, he saw the opening of the bay. Well, it was impossible to see, but he knew it was there. It was the spot where the ocean morphed seamlessly into the sky, no distinction other than the knowledge that there must be a line between the two.

            
-------- Updated 3/20/13

           While staring at the vast blackness before him, Jody slowly became aware of something new. Everything was quiet. There were no car horns, no sirens, no talking, no constant phone notifications. There was the gentle sound of the bay waters moving, but that sound becomes so in sync with breath it turns into an extension of body, an external reserve of blood and life being guided by the pulse of one’s heart. Jody, who had lived up until this point as an empty being of influence, felt this.

            For the first time in his life, Jody thought. Truly thought. Not about what his crew was doing or what he would do with them when he returned home, but about everything below the immediate surface of his mind. With no distractions, all he had was quiet and himself.

            At first he thought about nothing. He had reached this new freedom of solitude and even in a blank state he was experiencing a greater kind of thought he had ever known. Suddenly, his mind dove directly into the bay before him, immediately being swept around by invisible currents.