You were the girl who didn’t speak.
You were the girl who spoke before her time. Look: four years old and already feasting on little bears flying to the moon or the monster at the end of this book. In a year and a half, the kindergarten teacher will be annoyed that someone in his class has learned to cipher words without his help.
"It makes things difficult," he tells your mother, with consternation. She doesn't know whether he's referring to his teaching job or your young life.
You were the girl who listened, who saw. There! The classmates, the cliques, making a certain sense of high school striations. “She’s so quiet.” And hearing, you understood:
Secret.
Inscrutable.
Strange.
Ninth Grade English: The girl in the desk next to yours. “Can you pass this note?” Sound emerges from her moving mouth like the teacher in Charlie Brown. You were the girl who shook her head again and again, trying to parse the words into sense.
“Never mind.” You hear the scorn. That classmate shakes back her silk curtain of hair down the soundwaves of decades and turns away, sniggering, “Definitely weird.”
If you could have seen your own self, you’d have let their “not normal” slide like water off a duck’s back. You’d have shaken your wings and laughed, the whole world of the English language activated in your mind. You carry buoyancy like the words of millennia, of very Beginning. Who could ground you to pass mere folded notes across rows of desks?
Your dad has boasted all these years about teaching you to read on his knee in the first annum of the Nineteen Eighties, but this is the truth: You were the girl who held words like blown glass, like a fire, like water coursing through your hands since the day you were born.
Selectively Mute, they call it. Also, Hyperlexic. How can anyone say anything when meaning hangs in the very air, refracting light into every mote and cell? Enveloped in language, you are the woman who listens, who sees. Most days now, dismissive words roll right off your back. Your mallard feathers shimmer in the sun, transcendent under the bounty of silent speech.
This essay was longlisted for Ruminate Magazine’s 2024 The Waking contest and published in MockingOwl Roost’s April 2024 Joy issue.
This is a beautiful piece. This part especially struck me: "You were the girl who held words like blown glass, like a fire, like water coursing through your hands since the day you were born."
"How can anyone say anything when meaning hangs in the very air, refracting light into every mote and cell?" Yes, this is what the world feels like. Thank you for articulating it.