Fabienne Styles

I am not deaf today. Not fully.
Earplugs will not make me profoundly deaf.
But I’m doing my best to find out what it is like.

My world is not silent, but the background rumble of everyday life
Has been removed.
I clap my hands.

Nothing.

I try again, harder, louder.

Yes. I hear it now. . .
distant, as if someone in another room were clapping.
I detect the confusion of senses in my brain, as it tries to adjust to my new situation. I can vaguely hear the
noisy lawnmower outside the bedroom window
just.

Moving downstairs the first thing I notice is
the absence of footfalls.
I begin to feel as if I have been swept away from my body, it’s like some kind of Outer Body Experience.
...
Perhaps this is what it is like to be a ghost.

I cannot fail to be reminded that I am alive though.
My breathing is irritatingly loud, whilst the
click of blinking eyes begins to annoy me.
My little internal clock keeps ticking away to Judgement Day.
...
I wonder to myself, the deaf do not hear the outside world,
but do they sometimes hear the inside?

My family seem to think I’m being sulky,
as I do not always answer their questions.
I roll my eyes and point to my ears once again.
They look sheepish
and carry on with what they are doing.

I see the cats mouthing their cat-talk at me.
I chat back to them, just to be polite.
My voice has a tinny quality,
As if it’s a long distance call on the telephone,
or a recording.

The noise of eating and drinking is deafening and horrible.
I do not like it.

I start to speculate.
In my head, when I think to myself, I almost hear it.
Not physically, but my inner voice possesses the same qualities as my outer one used to.
...
But if you’ve never heard your own voice,
do you have an inner one?
Or is it just a world of ideas flowing in images,
a whirlwind array of colour and light?

I’ve discovered what this feels like.
It is a dream.
The same false voices and hush of my sleeping world ...
that is why I am almost floating in this sea of
almost-silence.

They say that when you lose a sense, your others compensate.
I’ve decided this is not true.
They have not become better,
I have become more aware of them
I still know when anyone is moving around in this house.
But I do not hear them.
I feel their vibrations through my feet and legs, through the chair.
It has not taken my body long to rely on the remaining four.

The Aborigine creation myth is called The Dream-time.
It was a time before the world and its inhabitants were created.
I believe that what I am experiencing now is how it would have sounded.

Voices and footfalls are hushed.
Waiting for bodies to belong to.

Water is trickling, distant.
Always around the next corner,
a mirage of a sound.

A veil of silence lies between me and the rest of the world.
It is time I left this Dream-time, and return to My World.

I am so lucky.

I have that choice.