Mirror to My Soul by Heather Mirassou

Some mornings I wake 
in a world stitched shut.
Sound sealed, behind a frosted window.
Other days, a thin crack opens slightly.
It's just enough for a murmur of living to slip in.
It sneaks in like, a timid animal.

I read people's lips 
the way others read the weather.
The slight curve of a vowel,
the storm-glint of a consonant.
Mouths flicker like the lanterns in the fog,
lighting the path to meaning 
one pulse at a time. 

But behind me                               
that is where fear lives.
The space that lives there,
I cannot name,
I cannot hear.
I don't know how to react.

A stranger stepping close,.  
a loved one calling my name.
Danger whispering its arrival,
all of it becomes the same
A silent ghost at my back.

Music is different,
If I turn it up, as loud as possible,
I can hear all of the instruments.
I inherit each sound, each rhythm, each word.
Drums rumble through my bones,
like tectonic secrets..

Loved ones speak
and I watch their words
unfurl into soft architecture
of their lips, their breath shaping
meanings.
I gather them like fallen petals,
Sometimes I miss a few.

I live in the hinge
between silence and
almost sound,
between what I feel and
what I can't reach.
Some days I vanish into 
quiet completely.
Some days I wear hearing
like a veil.

But I keep moving,
through light,
through lips,
through walls,
through music.

In a world that speaks
whether I heard it or not,
and a body that listens,
in every way that I can.