I wish I could hear again. I wish I didn’t have to keep telling people to “write it down, I’m deaf”. As a composer, was hearing not my most important sense? Why should God choose me of all men, to lose it. I hear nothing now, unlike Christoph. I wish I was like him, some days.

 

The door to my room opens. “I knocked, but you didn’t hear me.” Christoph says nervously. He sighs, before continuing slowly, “My father designed this.” He appears to sniffle back the pain of loss, “Not all physicians are quacks.”

 

I take the ear trumpet he’s holding from him, and reply, “Thank you,” trying to be polite, if only for a moment.

 

“Try it.” he says in his young voice, from what I can tell from my lip reading, full of the hope that I’ve lost, after all those failures.

 

I put it to my ear, and he says, “Can you hear me?”

 

I can’t. Not anymore.