Our New Home

Yana Vierboom, Office of Population Research

Honorable Mention

“Just a few letters today,” I read in extra-large font on my new speech transcription app. “This is a.”

A.

Blinking through the double vision, I look up from my phone to find my partner’s neat fist, fingers untucked. I copy him with my own fist, or I do my best.

“And here’s be.”

B.

He unfurls his fingers and points them toward the fluorescent lights above. His thumb gently slopes across his palm.

“And see.” His fingers shift again, this time into a crescent. “This one is easy.”

C.

The residual anesthesia makes my eyelids heavy, even though it’s been days since the last surgery. I melt into the hard seat of the clinic at the Berlin Charité but can’t get comfortable, no matter how I cross my legs or bend to the side. I haven’t laid flat in ages because the wounds on my head need to heal. To become scars.

Later that day, or maybe it’s the next, he shows me our first word in American Sign Language. My first word in our new language. It’s the crescent shape I already know from the letter C, facing his chest and pulled downwards.

“Hungry.”

He raises his eyebrows, and the sign becomes a question.

“Hungry?”

We order Indian takeout, but it’s hard to eat with my half-paralyzed face. I yelp every time I bite my cheek.

We’ve learned all the letters of the alphabet by the time we’re ready to leave Berlin in our rented red convertible. A few weeks ago, we wanted to drive to brain surgery with the top down and a summer breeze in our hair, showing the tumor who’s boss. Now that the surgeries are over, the car is impractical. I squeeze through the front door, into the blanket nest in the back.

“Why are you deaf?” a doctor later asks via the transcription app. I explain about the brain tumor diagnosis at age 31 and how, three days after the removal surgery, I inexplicably woke up deaf.

“But that’s tragic.” The doctor’s eyes are wide, like he’s imagining his own life without birdsong.

“It really isn’t so bad,” I tell him. “Not once you get over the initial shock.”

But he, like everyone, doesn’t seem to believe that there’s a bright side. For one, I’m sleeping better than ever because few sounds in the world are loud enough to wake me. And I notice more things than I used to—how my footsteps vibrate up my shins, the detailed nuances of others’ facial expressions, the way sunlight filters through leaves.

We drive back to Berlin for check-ups every now and then, but we don’t choose the rental convertible again.

One day, on our way home from a discouraging meeting with a nerve surgeon, I pause the podcast that I see is playing on the car stereo.

“What is a person?” I ask.

I raise my phone’s microphone to his mouth, like I’m hosting my own philosophy podcast.

“What?” reads the screen.

“What makes a person a person? How much can I lose before I’m not me?”

“I don’t understand.”

“My face, my hearing, my old laugh. Am I still me without them?”

“No. You’re a different you now.”

There, in white on black, in extra-large font, is my biggest fear. He knows that I’m different now, that I’m canceling on a promise I made him. I promised him me—in sickness and in health, sure, but still me. Not this new, dismantled me.

He can’t leave me now—no one can leave a partner after a difficult brain surgery and expect to still have friends. Not for the first six months, at least. But what about in a year?

I push these ugly thoughts deep into my brain as the global pandemic envelops us like a blanket. Seasons of isolation fade into one another as we fold new routines into our life, new ways of doing old things. He flips the light switch if he wants my attention from across the room, and we pull the kitchen table out from its nook in the corner so I can see him sign. We get a cat. He points out that she’s the first friend I make who only knows me as deaf.

We keep a small notebook with purple flowers on it to keep track of our new signs in ASL. The first few pages read like the vocabulary lists of my high school French classes. Me, you, us. Family. Breakfast. Cheese. Several pages in, the words grow more abstract. Politics. Identity. Cherish.

Still, things don’t feel normal.

To communicate at night, he shows me the fingerspelling alphabet of British Sign Language. Unlike ASL, BSL fingerspells using two hands, the index finger of one hand tapping and tracing parts of the other. To spell words in the darkness, he finds my palm under the covers and taps the corresponding spots on my hand.

“W-A-T-E-R,” he spells on my hand one night.

“You want a glass of water?”

No. I left the bathroom faucet running at full force.

Somehow, time continues to pass, and I miraculously give birth to twins. The vibrations from their newborn voices against my chest are the most beautiful thing my body has ever felt. I’m implanted with a cochlear implant to regain access to sounds. When I wear it, my tinnitus is less deafening. Slowly, I return to work.

Two and a half years after the surgery, we celebrate our first New Year’s Eve out of COVID lockdown. To make our first restaurant experience in years as special as possible, we take a deep dive into Yelp reviews. We choose a stylish Afghani restaurant in Lübeck.

We’re shown to our table, squeezed in amid the other revelers. We unpeel our winter layers and marvel at the humanity around us. The last time we ate in a restaurant, I could hear. Now, I don’t know how to adjust my voice for the setting, how to modulate my volume to account for the background noise. It’s just a guess, but—the hum of multiple conversations, silverware tapping plates, chairs scraping the stone floor…music playing?

Instinctively, I turn off my voice, and we slip into signing. My body settles into itself, as if I’m sliding into a warm bath after a long day. I couldn’t hear the other guests when we arrived, and now I don’t see them either. I see only him and his hands at our table for two.

What’s more, no one can enter our capsule. Our mixture of signed English and ASL is a protective charm against eavesdroppers here in northern Germany. We’re in a world more private than we’ve ever had. We argue about politics, we describe our dream day, we rank other people’s weddings.

We order pulao and two curries. He in halting German and I, natively fluent but unable to hear anything the waiter says. We make a strange team.

“Hungry?” He signs after we order.

“You know I am!” I sign back. I skipped lunch in preparation. “But first, tell me…where is Afghanistan? Like…what countries does it border?”

“Seriously? What an embarrassing question to ask in an Afghani restaurant.”

“That’s why I’m signing. I don’t care if you think I’m stupid.”

And suddenly, right after I learn where Afghanistan is, it strikes me.

We are talking like us again—and I feel like me again.

All because he made us the gift of a new home, spoken on our hands.