Status: Not sure how long this will be
Comfort in Sound
Chapter 1
I sit on the edge of the river bank with tips of my toes barely touching the rushing water. I watch the restless water and it rushes by, the branches in the trees over head as they swing too and throw. I imagine what each would sound like, I try to grasp the meaning of sound as it surround me.
I take comfort knowing that the world isn’t still, that everything has its meaning, its story as it moves around me. But I sometimes wished that I could hear those stories.
See the thing is I was born deaf, completely 100 percent deaf. My world is completely silent, I have no residual hearing. You could blow an air horn in my ear and I still would not be able to hear anything.
Yet I take comfort in knowing that sound was all around me. I see the sounds in the way the water bubbled, how the leaves shook, and how the bird overhead sings.
‘You day dreaming again?’ My best Alison asks after she’d waved her tiny childlike hand in front of my face. I give her a guilty lopsided smiles, because I had in fact been day dreaming.
‘What does the water sound like?’ Alison only had a mild hearing loss but most of her family was deaf or hard of hearing so she grow up signing. Her dark eyebrows lower in a frown over her bright blue eyes. She looks confused as she tries to grasp how to explain it. ‘If it’s too hard don’t worry about it.’
‘It’s hard I can’t say it sounds like something else because you wouldn’t understand.’ she looks quite upset by this.
‘Try please. Use actions and pictures to describe if you have too.’
‘Okay.’ She takes her time thinking, running her hand through her long brown hair like she does when she’s nervous. She dips her hand into the water and pulls it up capping a small palm of water she takes my arm and drops the water into my elbow and lets the cold water slowly trickle down my arm. ‘This is how I’d describe the stream, it’s flowing softly.
She places her hand back in the water and pulls it out before flicking her fingers. Water droplets land on my surprised face.
She laughs ‘Rain’
I take comfort knowing that the world isn’t still, that everything has its meaning, its story as it moves around me. But I sometimes wished that I could hear those stories.
See the thing is I was born deaf, completely 100 percent deaf. My world is completely silent, I have no residual hearing. You could blow an air horn in my ear and I still would not be able to hear anything.
Yet I take comfort in knowing that sound was all around me. I see the sounds in the way the water bubbled, how the leaves shook, and how the bird overhead sings.
‘You day dreaming again?’ My best Alison asks after she’d waved her tiny childlike hand in front of my face. I give her a guilty lopsided smiles, because I had in fact been day dreaming.
‘What does the water sound like?’ Alison only had a mild hearing loss but most of her family was deaf or hard of hearing so she grow up signing. Her dark eyebrows lower in a frown over her bright blue eyes. She looks confused as she tries to grasp how to explain it. ‘If it’s too hard don’t worry about it.’
‘It’s hard I can’t say it sounds like something else because you wouldn’t understand.’ she looks quite upset by this.
‘Try please. Use actions and pictures to describe if you have too.’
‘Okay.’ She takes her time thinking, running her hand through her long brown hair like she does when she’s nervous. She dips her hand into the water and pulls it up capping a small palm of water she takes my arm and drops the water into my elbow and lets the cold water slowly trickle down my arm. ‘This is how I’d describe the stream, it’s flowing softly.
She places her hand back in the water and pulls it out before flicking her fingers. Water droplets land on my surprised face.
She laughs ‘Rain’
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Thanks for reading