The sound of my fingers tapping the keys. People chatting in languages I can't even identify, let alone understand. Honking cars. Hawking streetkids, yelling daily, daily, the new one, the new one. A familiar word of Japanese. Flip-flops doing their languid flips and flops across the tiled floor. A door creaking open. A chair being pulled back. A drawer opening. A calculator sliding across the desk.
I hear all of this, and my mind wanders, and I suddenly wonder what it would be like to be deaf, to have these ordinary, everyday sounds absent from my consciousness. Can you miss something you never had? Do deaf people dream of sounds, and if so, do they savor those sounds, cherish them for whatever length of dream-time is available that particular night, or do they resent those intrusions from an outside, possibly celestial force? What do they hear inside of their head when they awake? Is it an empty or hollow sound, like the sound of the ocean in a seashell? Can they find pockets of audible noise in the silence of their thoughts that those of us in the hearing world neglect to locate?
I'm twenty-nine, and there is so, so much I do not know. So many questions I've yet to ask.
