Hello darling reader my friend posted this meme on FB and it tickled my brain. I looked at the meme and wrote the below between other tasks on my phone. I also embedded a link to a recording of sounds the Earth makes that I was thinking about as well.
I don’t really remember the accident or much about the few days before and a month after. We turned into the poster kids for some anti-drunk driving campaign back in the day, my gorgeous dark dark Mama in a photo in the hospital with me in the ICU, bandages all over my head, still the portrait of the tragic little Negress. It didn’t matter to me; I had a traumatic brain injury. To be real about it, I don’t remember most everything from then except for waking up to the light.
Nobody tells you that it can take days to come all the way out, I felt like I was fumbling my way through a maze of too bright light, too loud voices, too many things touching me, it was confusion. Too many people looking at me and baby telling me when all I wanted was to close my eyes. Movies always made me think that I’d wake up and I don’t know maybe have that thing where I could speak a whole other language or something but instead, I got aphasia. Sounds like a cute name for a pretty baby but, my brain decided i could no longer speak.
After the lawsuits, the everything Mama did to make sure I would be provided for I ain’t mad about it. Thing is, I never talked a lot to start with. We learned ASL, Mama encouraged me to decide for myself what to do once the money came in from the settlements. Just before my 19th birthday we sat together staring at a bank statement and she looked at me and shook her head, “well baby I guess if we had to get hit, it was good it was that white kid.” Said kid had been 21 years old with a long record and parents with long money.
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I never told anyone, not even Mama, that I heard. It started sometime after my first surgery, I heard so much. Nurses murmuring, my nighttime nurse saying little prayers while they checked on me, singing me bits of Tagalog lullabies. Without having to engage in the world I heard it. My night nurse, nurse Ong’s voice while they sang to me teased out the message from the ambient noise, “Ikaw ba’y natutulog,” a pause, a hum, “are you sleeping?” I remember wondering if they had bilingual kids but after a while all I could hear was the message.
I thought for a while it was something to do with my aphasia that maybe my brain was trying to know Tagalog but that wasn’t it. I spent my time when I wasn’t working trying to figure it out. I combed the bowels of the internet, bulletin boards, later social media, youtube everywhere for something that sounded close. It wasn’t that they sang Tagalog into my consciousness, it was that my consciousness heard a tone in their voice in their mother tongue that opened me to hear the message.
The night I figured it out was typical of me. After a few years of listlessness I decided to become an ASL interpreter and as I got older I became a darling on the performance circuit, I did spoken word, I rapped, I did all of that and made my own money, enough to spend endless night listening until I got it.
Sometimes i wonder if i could still speak would I tell? Mama is long gone. I got no kids. I got no lover. I got no Gods. No I’m lying, I don’t wonder I fucking know. I wouldn’t. I hear, I understand and I’ll wait. I got nothing but time.
The message is always the same: