If there was something going on and I couldn’t understand, he wouldn’t say “Never mind,” or brush it off. He’d just enunciate carefully, having learned how to make it easier on me. We could be at a loud concert, and he’d text me instead of trying to scream across the crowd. Or he’d stand on the opposite side of a crowded room, lip-reading and telling me jokes. There was a sense of a secret world that only we shared, which probably made our friendship so strong.

In a way, the hearing, processing, and translating functions of my false ears only serve to speed the efficiency at which my mind works. My mind flows from subject to thought without a single glance, only to return back to the same subject, having traveled to Jupiter and back in the same time it takes to twist off a bottle cap. If I weren’t deaf, I might just be...well...conventional.

Instead, I get to watch the way words spark off someone’s tongue, how their lip rolls give their emotions away before they even say their thoughts. I can play voyeur to an unwitting conversation on the bus or train.

I can think more about the words and their meaning, see through the false layers and to the flickering jumps from their vocal chords to the outward world. It may not be something I’d necessarily wish on someone else, but it seems to me I’m doing just fine with it. We cope. We learn. We live. There are always alternate routes.

My deafness doesn’t need to be mine. — Beliefnet.com (Concluded)