Imagine this. You are a senior and you can't talk. At all. Nada. You're mute. This is the situation for Jake Hayes, except he wasn't always mute. On the night of the big homecoming game, he went to a party and got into a car crash with a t-post speared right through his vocal cords. He's alive but he can't speak. Which is really bad because his life goal was to say "I love you" to Samantha Shay. "My biggest regret is what I didn't say..." Now he would never be able to. But what he couldn't say, he made up for by actions. "There was a lot of pain in that kiss. There was so much hurt and so much fear in it. I felt tears rolling down the both of our faces. But, in that kiss, there was even more want. We both wanted to smother out that pain, to not have so many horrible things in the all too recent past, to just be normal, to do the types of things we were supposed to be dealing with besides death and disability."
Anything can change your life dramatically, and it is up to you to try and make it the best you can make it. Or it will be harder to live through.
At first, Jake had a hard time dealing with being mute. “Not being able to talk sucks. There's no doubt about that. There's a lot of times when I almost feel like I'm trapped inside of myself. Like if I don't talk or yell or scream or laugh I'm going to explode. A lot of the time it almost feels like I'm suffocating." At first, he was just trying to get a grip on things. But then he found Samantha. And Samantha found him. "It would have been really easy to spiral down into drugs or alcohol that year, for both of us. But instead we were there, together. We'd taken all the bad things that had happened to us and turned them around into something good and bigger that the two of us." They both helped each other live through what they couldn't have lived through alone. Sometimes you just need that one person to help you through life.
This post has gotten me intrigued about the book. The idea of not being able to talk, even though you've had the ability previously, is a scary thought, and an interesting idea to explore in a book. I really agree with you theme, not as it relates to the book (because I wouldn't have any idea, seeing as I haven't read it), but as a general rule in life. A lot of the upperclassmen have told me, "High school is only what you make it. You'll get out what you put in." and I feel that that relates to your theme well. Obviously, Jake Hayes has a much more serious situation, but the idea there is the same.
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