Chapter 1: From Birth

Jaime

EVERYONE HATED JAIME. He tried and tried to get people to listen to him, but they just ignored him. He could hear them clearly, even when they were cluttering up what they were saying with noises from their mouths. But no one would answer him when he spoke.

The reason might have been because Jaime never opened his mouth. No one had ever heard him speak. He heard people better in his head than in his ears, but no one responded in his head. They just ignored him.

Understandably, Jaime thought everyone hated him.

Not everyone, perhaps. Jaime knew his parents loved him and worried about him all the time. The words that came out of their mouths were accompanied with warm feelings of love and acceptance. But in their heads, Jaime heard words like ‘slow to develop’ and ‘autistic.’ Of course, those words never came out of their mouths when they were around Jaime. The words were always accompanied by feelings of fear and anxiety. Words Jaime hadn’t learned the meaning of, but knew the feelings.

Jaime didn’t understand most of what people said in their heads. That was a problem from the moment he was born.

Apparently, being inside his mom shielded him from most thoughts, but once he was outside her protective womb and people were all around, he was bombarded with thoughts from everywhere. They were all strange and other. He couldn’t understand the thoughts. Everyone was shouting all at once in a language he didn’t understand.

It was frightening. Jaime started trying to close out the thoughts—to shut his mental ears—but didn’t know what to do. His body began to respond without his own volition. It started shutting down. He was overwhelmed by the sensations and thoughts he couldn’t understand. The noise in his head was too much for him. Jaime had so much input into his infant mind that he forgot important things—like breathing.

He was abruptly torn from his mother’s arms. People thinking urgent things put tubes in his nose and kept his heart beating. He was put in a plastic box that cut out much of the cacophony of thoughts.

He slept.

“I’d have to say the birth trauma did some permanent damage,” the doctor told Jaime’s mother and father. “I don’t know how much and at this stage, it’s hard to run any qualitative tests.”

“What should we do?” Nola asked. That was Mama to Jaime, but she never responded to him when he said the word in his head.

“The rest of his development seems normal. Growth. Motor skills. Weight gain. All well within the standards. I’d say continue to love him and don’t try to force speech development on him. Talk to him. Play with him. Just make sure he is confident in your love for him.”

“We can do that,” David said. That was Dada to Jaime.

Jaime heard the words in his head, but at three years old, he didn’t have a large enough vocabulary to understand what they meant. That was part of what was normal with him. His language development was par for his age group. He learned far more from listening in people’s heads than by listening with his ears. Some people didn’t use words in their heads and Jaime struggled to learn the words they said with their mouths. It was very complicated.

People who used fewer words and more pictures in their heads were easier to understand. It was people who only used feelings and intentions in their heads who were difficult to understand. Jaime didn’t understand all the pictures he saw in other people’s heads, either, but he learned from them, nonetheless. There were some things people thought and then immediately tried not to think. Some of those pictures seemed exciting to the thinker, but they were just pictures Jaime silently filed away in the back of his mind to understand later.

He could usually tell when a person was excited or happy or sad or angry or worried. He could understand emotions more easily than some words. He could tell what people felt when he felt them. But he seldom understood why they felt what they did. There didn’t seem to be words to match the feelings.

As Jaime’s fourth birthday approached and he had still never spoken a word, his parents grew even more concerned that something serious was wrong.