Yesterday I was true to myself;

I was unfaithful to everyone else.

This is what she wants

maybe it isn’t what she needs but

This is what she wants

Her family, her security, her home

This is what she wants

Safe, convenient, easy

This is what she wants 

She wants what she already has

 

She doesn’t want me

The life you offered was an honest one, a good one

It would have been a happy one. But it was an offer given too far down the road

She can look back at the future you offered, but she cannot change course.

Keep loving her: love her so much that she is free to love others unburdened by you

She breaks under the weight of your happiness

You want to fix her but each touch fractures

A hundred people stare at me
Each student looks to me for knowledge
They wait for me to tell them the way
But I am even more lost than they

I look at the child playing in the sand
Small, blond, and innocent
And I see myself when I was young
Small, blond, and innocent

How could you have been so angry
To strike someone like him – to strike me
What did we do so egregious when we were three, seven, and seventeen
that could only have been fixed by breaking our body and spirit with fists?

How could you hate such innocence
Hate a child who loves unconditionally?
How could you hate us when we were three but expect us to still love you at thirty?

I look at him and I see the good in the world
Hope. Wonder. Love. Trust. Happiness.
I look at him and I see all that I have lost
Lost because of your guilt.

You gave me the world on a keychain
And told me to never forget
I am the one who makes it spin

You have given me the world entire
But I would settle for your smile
I don’t need the world, all I need is you

“How did you find growing up deaf?”
“It was quiet”, I say glibbly
They don’t like my answer
I’m meant to say something inspiring

Tell them stories about persevering
How I overcame my disability
The heroic quest to fit into a noisy world
How I conquered all of my fears

But I don’t want to remember all the fights
Some days I like the calm, the peace
My perspiration isn’t their inspiration
Some days I really rather like the quiet

I don’t know if I wish I could be as strong as you

Or if I’d rather you were weaker, as weak as me

I’m happy being deaf most of the time. All my life the silence has comforted me

But the small sounds I miss. Sounds I’ve never heard unaided.

I wake and you welcome the day with ‘Good morning, my love’

But I will never hear those words unaided. I’ve never heard them simple and raw.

I miss hearing what I’ve never heard