You never understand how you really feel about a thing until you write about it.
I realized that I greatly dislike being hearing impaired. I realized that I’ve been living with my disability instead of overcoming it. I’ve realized that my complacency is what makes me handicapped, and if anything, this poem is the framework for a catalyst of change.
Enjoy, and may all your senses enjoy the world to its fullest.
Broken Ears
To the woman from Starbucks who called my hearing loss an excuse
for shitty customer service,
I hope you know that your
Grande Nonfat Vanilla Latte with two extra shots of espresso
was not a
Grande Nonfat Vanilla Latte with two extra shorts of espresso.
Maybe if God had heard my ten-year-old wish
for subtitles at the bottom of my eyes,
maybe if he didn’t curse people who speak in whispers
with the insane assumption that everyone can hear them just fine,
then maybe,
maybe I would have gotten your order in less time.
Conversations with me are like
laggy YouTube videos that you slowly lose interest in watching,
and I understand pressing refresh gets annoying
when I ask you to repeat yourself
more than once.
But I like to think the blacksmiths in my ears don’t get paid enough.
You see,
the outer ear captures sound waves
and sends them through the three bones of the
smithy’s middle ear shop:
he hammers the sound waves on an anvil and uses a stirrup
to knock them into the inner ear,
where everything falls apart.
Vestibular aqueduct syndrome.
When people ask what’s wrong with me,
I never give them a name to wrap
their pity around.
But jokingly explaining how I wish I could
replace the burned hair cells in my cochlea
with the hair on my head
doesn’t change the fact that I’m always
the last person to hear the punchline of a joke.
It doesn’t change the tightness of a tongue curled
around the trigger of machine gun apologizes
“Sorry, what was that again?”
“My bad, what did you say?”
“Whoops, sorry, didn’t catch that.”
What am I apologizing for?
The fact that until I got my hearing aids
I had no idea birds sang in the morning?
The fact that my life is a sitcom
in which I press an “audience laugh” button in
response to jokes I don’t hear?
To the woman from Starbucks who called my hearing loss an excuse
for shitty customer service,
know this:
I'm not afraid to admit that I never remember the
color of my lovers’ eyes
because I'm always too busy memorizing the wave of their smiles
while I'm reading their lips.
I'm not afraid to speak loudly
even if my r’s get lost in the slur
of prideful words.
I'm not afraid
To admit that I'm broken
Because all it means is that
I get to choose what to listen to
And believe me,
To the woman from Starbucks who called my hearing loss an excuse
for shitty customer service
Believe me,
I've got two broken ears
and one mouth
So when I decide what to listen to
It’s not you.
It’s not you.
** Check out another article I wrote if you want to understand why hearing loss sucks in bed. And yes, that means in bed.
