The Space Between Hearing and Loss

There’s a space between a hearing person and me.

An expanse that changes shape and size as it

Fills with the sounds and meanings of spoken language.

To the hearing people, this space is invisible.

They don’t even know it exists,

As they converse easily, crisply, back-and-forth.

But the people with hearing loss, we know something different.

Noise and meaning are fractured in this sometimes painful space

Containing half sounds with

   Blurry edges

   Hollow middles

Or even nothingness—as if the sound never happened.

We work hard to understand, but often

Get things wrong and must ask for them to be repeated, again.

This is the space between hearing and loss. 

And we can conquer it.

Some of us will say, “I never had good hearing, so how can I have lost it?”

And some of us say, “Hearing has slowly dripped away” or

“It left so fast I didn’t have time to say goodbye.”

That was then and this is now:

Let’s smooth the space between us and them.

Let’s use technology, develop skill at reading faces, and learn how to pull

Better communication from the people on the other side.

Communication is the glue that connects us.

Without it, we really would be islands, separate from each other.

And I don’t want that kind of space between a hearing person and me.