by Kelly Ma
I first became aware of it through fragments.
A sentence I almost heard, falling to pieces before it fully reached me. I’d hear a burst of laughter at something I missed the context of and then smile belatedly, as though arriving a moment after something that had already happened. I dismissed it initially-my own lack of attention, or the world’s. But as time went on the blanks began to form patterns-little missing slivers of sound I couldn’t easily account for.
It wasn’t the absence of sound.
The certainty I was missing was how sound was meant to be heard.
Painting by Jorge Schuber, “Music“
About the Author
Kelly is a teen writer who continues to write through hearing loss, believing that storytelling is guided not by the ears, but by the heart.