Let Go Today, Die Laughing Tomorrow

I didn't know what the first sign of old age would be. I'm sure it's different for everyone: a persistent ache here or there, a rounding of the belly, the first pair of eyeglasses. I've had all of these sneak up on me, but I fought off the aches and the belly, and I can cheat on the glasses unless I'm reading.

For me, the first sign of age has been a slow but definite (deafening?) loss of hearing. Tinnitus screams at me all day, particularly during quiet moments, as now, when I'm sitting peacefully in front of my computer in the pinkening dusk of a solitary evening. Joggers drift by on the street outside my window; squirrels are putting themselves to bed in my pecan trees; a last, lazy dove flaps in to settle beside her mate. I can hear the cars going by on a nearby busy street, and the wind brushing through the fall leaves. But above all that, tinnitus screeches and howls. 

It's all in my head. Or, more precisely, the microscopic parts of my eardrums. They've been damaged over the years, runs the theory, and now are jangling out of control. I don't remember exactly when this happened, but I can believe that it did. One too many rock shows without hearing protection, dancing in front of the speakers with my spine vibrating to the beat and all my chakras freaking out in unison. I'm pretty sure the snake coiled at the base of my spine exploded up through my eardrums and blew them into nirvana. 

So I am slowly and slightly going deaf. And it hurts. Did you know that? If you don't experience hearing loss, you may not know that it hurts. This is when sounds really become an issue. Movie theaters and concerts as well as soft sounds. Loud sounds, like rock shows, really hurt. You'd think the opposite, right? Like what're you complaining about, Slowly Going Deaf Person, since you can't hear the sounds? Well, the little hairs in my cochlea (that's not a naughty body part, it's the word for the inner ear) are damaged, and thus my inner ear cannot properly process sound, so loud stuff just comes at it like a train. A garbled, shaking, howling train. 

Soft sounds are a whole other issue. My boyfriend's voice, for example, is a soft sound. He is a soft-spoken person with a tendency to mumble (unless angry, and then he becomes brilliantly articulate and audible). Soft-Spoken Mumbler plus Slowly Going Deaf Person equals pretty much a constant game of Telephone at our house. Remember Telephone? That fun game where we all sat in a circle as kids and whispered in one another's ears and the whisper went around the circle until it became something else entirely? Hearing the fucked-up translation at the other end was lots of fun. 

We play Telephone at our house every time S.S. Mumbler says something from just outside of S.G. Deaf Person's earshot, which can be in the next room or merely several yards away, depending on whether there's any noise going on in the house. Like the dryer, the dishwasher, music, outdoor noise: anything at all. Yesterday morning, for example, my boyfriend was upstairs and I was downstairs. He shouted (he knows he has to shout if he's upstairs): 

"Are you taking the doggie?"

This sort of made sense to me, because I was thinking of the errand I had to run to the bookstore in just a half-hour or so. So I shouted back:

"To the bookstore?"--and walked to the bottom of the stairs to confirm. I met his bemused face staring down at me. 

"I said, Are you making more coffee?" he repeated. I hesitated a beat. 

"Sure. Would you like it here or at the bookstore?"

Exchanges like this have become more common in the past year, which tells me my ears are steadily marching toward oblivion. I'm a little young, maybe, to lose them like this. But worrying about my hearing is strangely low on my priority list right now. Higher up are climate change, figuring out how to live in my van, writing another book, and being neurotic about procrastinating writing said book. 

Actually, and this may sound weirdest of all, I'm grateful for the little reminders that my body is wearing out. It's a signal of something larger at work, which is that I am dying. Not actively, but quietly, slowly, surely. Death is out there in the near or far future, and one day when I wake up or one night when I go to sleep, that will be my last day or night. It'll be quick and shocking or slow and grinding or somewhere in the middle, but whatever it is, I want to learn to welcome it. Maybe it will be terrifying and I'll want to come back and kick my now-self for writing this. But these little losses--my hearing, my vision, my range of motion--are friends that come ahead of time to prepare me. The idea is to rest into them, laugh at their jokes, learn the little things they have to teach; namely, letting go. I greet them with gratitude. 

Salut, little friends. Goodbye, little comforts. Welcome, funny little telephone game. Perhaps I should make a poem out of you:

Are you taking the doggie?

Are you making more coffee?

Cecil's having a magic show;

We haven't gotten any snow.

Get me four potatoes,

I said tomatoes,

Get me more tomatoes.

I can't find any handles (?)

I'd like to have more candles (oh)

I got you shaving cream

--But I don't use shaving cream

I said I wanted Listerine.