where i am, there aren't
many people who understand
the clean start you bring.

if i could i would
pluck you from the sky,
walk you through my life.

say, "this is where i saw you first.
this is where i turned my prayers
to you instead of god."

say, "this is where i stared at
the pale insides of my wrists
before i matched our glows."

say, "this is where i realized
you are the closest i will ever get
to a culture i'll never know."

if i could i would
polish you to perfection
and push you to the heavens.

i'd cover you with
my mother's silk scarves,
drop them one by one.

dear moon, old friend;
thank you for this hard reboot.
i'll pay you in red envelopes
the next time we meet.

i fell in love through song,
through a girl like me
loving a girl like you.

i fell in love not in a heartbeat,
not in a breath.
these things take time.
i take time.

i fell in love through a song
i played on repeat three days ago.
i fell in love with you
through words i cannot hear.

say cowboy.
say hot dog.
say ice cream.
say baseball.
see, the step into the sound booth is an awkward height,
about 6 inches off the ground,
and i find myself raised on a pedestal,
sealed in for you to inspect,
watching you and an audiologist
through a glass window,
watching you decide my future
as you face away from me
so i cannot read your lips
and you cannot see me shouting stop.

say airplane,
say sidewalk,
say you might hear static in your right ear
but i know i will only hear a tone,
an electronic beep going on and on and on

say conducive hearing loss say sensoneurial damage say surgery say it might be permanent this time,
like it hasn't been permanent for the last ten years,
say there's a new technique say we can fix this,
say negative impact on social life, say poor classroom performance,
say we just want what's best for you,
say try hearing aids try CIs try cued speech,
say you need to be fixed.

it's been a decade since i first entered that sound booth,
noises not echoing off these walls that take a little more from me with every test.
it's been a decade since my hearing slipped away and
i am done mourning it but i don't think you are.

persistence is a valuable trait but stop trying,
stop putting me under with an x on my right cheek so the surgeons know how to lay me out on the operating table,
stop refusing to turn on the captions because i need the practice,
stop talking to me without tapping me first,
stop screaming at me when i mishear.

i am done mourning my hearing and i don't know if i ever grieved in the first place but you are still stuck in the stage of denial,
hoping against hope for some ******* miracle.
i don't want a miracle, i don't want anything god can give me because i am not lacking, i am whole, i already am the miracle you were looking for and i don't need to be fixed.

but you don’t believe that, do you?

so the audiologist can open the heavy soundproof door but i am still trapped inside this box,
the walls swallowing my words as you decide my future for me because
no one wants to listen to those who cannot hear.

say stop sign,
say hairbrush,
say push the button when you hear the beep
and i hold it down with my thumb,
gripping the clicker like the handle of a gun
until you tell me to let go.
but i hear deserts stretching away from me,
flat sci-fi dreamscapes where there is only one sound and i can hear it too.

say tinnitus,
say psychosomatic because you don't believe that i might hear infinity where you tell me i shouldn't.
say hole in the eardrum say the surgery might have accelerated the deterioration,
say we can try again but
i gave up ten years ago and i think you should too,
and i'm here in this sound booth screaming for you to stop
but you will not look at me,
will not even attempt communication.

no one wants to listen
to those who cannot hear.

the sun and moon collided,
burning desperate tragedies.

but i think you and i
might have been the real casualties.

I WANT TO BE REMEMBERED. i want my name to echo through the ages, ringing into the ground. i want my image memorialized in someone’s eyes. i want sinking ships named after me, my name whispered as some prayer to the past.

and if that means i have to destroy the world:
so be it.

full stop, false start.
you're fooling everyone except
the one who [should] matter.

let's read shakespeare.
hand me othello's tale of woe.
watch me stop halfway through,
fiction all too real.

pause.
exhale.

i told you i was glass,
fingernails like windows
into my bloodstream,
but you cracked me anyways.

and it's like you took from me
these endless skies
and pretended the stars
had always been black.

it's like you dropped on me
the atomic ******* bomb
then pretended your fallout
was nothing but smoke.

12:37 AM
do you ever wake up wondering whether the stars watch us

12:37 AM
like reverse stargazing

12:37 AM
do you think they see us like we see them or

12:38 AM
are we more familiar to them

12:38 AM
than the other way around



2:49 AM
hey you know what

2:49 AM
i think we're not so differ

2:49 AM
different

2:50 AM
us and the stars

2:52 AM
maybe you can tell me what you think when you meet them



3:17 AM
remember that one time jupiter swung down for the moon?

3:18 AM
i saw no stars that night



5:10 AM
you told me once that i'd forgotten to count the galaxies

5:12 AM
and i told you that

5:12 AM
the night before

5:13 AM
i'd never stopped counting



8:02 PM
don't you ever wonder what it would feel like

8:03 PM
to look down on the earth

8:27 PM
from the milky way?

8:40 PM*
don't you ever wonder why we never will?

here’s kind of a funny story.

they knew i had hearing loss when i was eight. what followed was doctors and operations and more doctors and the funny thing is that they still don’t know why i can’t hear out of my right ear. what’s not quite as funny is how i treated it. how i thought that this was something to be ashamed of and hidden, how i thought that it was weak, somehow, to not be able to hear.

it’s hard in class, sometimes. if we’ve got some kind of discussion going and people all over the room are talking and i’ve got to turn my head, whipping around from person to person, trying to get my left ear pointed in their direction. i never make it every time so it’s always a cut, disjointed thing, the tail end of a sentence that i don’t have the context for. sometimes there’s background noise and that makes it worse. loud air conditioning or people whispering and i can’t focus, can’t hear, even when it’s just the teacher talking and i’ve gotten my left ear set up in their direction. i’d love to tell them to shut up but i’m pretty sure they think i’m aloof because sometimes when they talk to me i don’t hear them.

asking teachers for closed captions is hard. going up to them and pretty much telling them hey, i can’t hear, change your class for me, is something i don’t think i’ll ever be good at. and sometimes they don’t know what i’m talking about. sometimes they ask the class to fix it and oh god that’s embarrassing because i know it’s nothing to be ashamed of but i still am. ashamed, that is.

there are these old movies from the eighties that we watch in history class. they don’t have captions. the ones about china are my favorite because it’s like, that’s me. that’s who i could’ve been. and the movies, they’ve got these interview segments. people speaking in Chinese, their first language, and us listening. they turn down the volume on the Chinese and lay over it English translations of whatever it is they’re saying and maybe for other people that’s a good thing but for me it’s not. for me it means that the Chinese that i don’t really know but can guess at fades into this muddle of sound, English and Chinese and cheesy background music all mushed together in something that i can’t hear.

i still don’t know what they say on the school announcements and i’m done caring.

sometimes i’m sitting in the audience of the auditorium and i don’t really know what’s going on. school assemblies are the worst. rapping and fuzzy mikes and so much background noise that even if i wanted to hear the stage i wouldn’t be able to. all i can do is cover my left ear and try to ignore the faded feedback from the right. because it’s not rude if you’re not covering both ears, right?

(i can’t stand not knowing so it’s better to cut that off at the beginning. to make sure i know that i won’t be able to hear them with three-fourths of my hearing gone. it’s less disappointing, that way.)

i can hear the people i need to. it takes a while but if i know someone’s voice well enough, if i care enough to learn it, it’s easier to understand, even if i only catch an intonation of a syllable instead of a word. and they know. they know i can’t hear so they walk on my left side and i love them for it. if someone won’t walk on my left side when i ask them to i know that i won’t learn their voice.

someone tell me why it’s the twenty-first century and people still think “deaf and dumb” is a definition instead of an outdated relic. someone tell me why it’s the twenty-first century and audism runs rampant through people who would rather label us than know us. someone tell me why it’s the twenty-first century and there are still people who think deafness is an illness. that my hearing is something that should be cured. that it’s stupid, ridiculous, to be proud of a “defect.”

someone tell me why my ASL teacher didn’t stop to ask the class if someone had trouble hearing. wait, no, you don’t need to tell me. i know why. it’s because you assume hearing until you’re wrong and that’s so strange to me, because i haven’t been hearing in years and it’s not like i’m trying that hard to hide it. you’d think that someone who knows ASL would realize if one of her students had no idea what was going on.

the first thing someone asks me when they learn i’ve got hearing loss is whether i read lips. i don’t read lips. take away the sound and have me stare at a silent video and i’m helpless. but i can supplement. i can take what i’ve heard and match it up with the movement of the lips, the throat. is that an R? yeah, it is. did they say elephant? yeah, they did.

it took me a long time to tell myself that this was okay. that not all communication is verbal and how, exactly, is this an exception? maybe people think i’m strange for staring at their mouths when they speak but if they don’t know why it’s not really their business to know.

someone tell me why it took my whole life to realize that i don’t care whether i can hear or not as long as i understand the world around me.

that’s why math is my favorite class, i think. no lectures or explanations necessary. just me and the numbers and mathematical notation.

math is a class that i don’t need to hear in. and i’m most comfortable with the silence.

the moon knows.

she has seen countless confessions in her light, watched life and death alike, and judged none of it. the moon is the one who will not whisper your secrets to the stars. she is just a reflection, after all. limited by her existence.

the sun is the one who will betray you, will turn his back on you, will scream everything you've done to everyone awake to hear. the sun shines and does not care if you burn beneath him.

the moon does not care, either, but she is not vindictive, and for that, we tell her things the sun will never know.

didn't anyone tell you that the moon can keep a secret?

she is not the sun.