The first sound I ever heard was the intro to Canon in D.  It hurt.  The deep baritones in the beginning section set off a numbing ache in my ear, making it impossible to think.  I fumbled for the off switch on my head, shivered as I touched the strange plastic device.  The nurse looked at me, not at all surprised, and took off my headphones.  I sat for a minute, hands over my ears that can’t be my ears that got me here in the first place.  I considered ripping the hearing thing off my head, but decided against it because that would not be good for anybody.  Stupid ears.   But I was curious.  I had to see what happened next.  To end this right now and sign to them that I wasn’t ready yet seemed too anticlimactic.  My first sound had a grand resonance to it, too great to be ignored.  I played with the device on my head again and signed to the nurse to put the headphones back on.  The music resumed.  It was horrible at first, and the aching in my ear started again, making me wonder for the briefest second how anybody could live with such a terrible screeching invading their thoughts all day.  I was tempted to turn off the implant, but squinted my eyes shut and tried to tough it out.  After the intro, the notes seemed to blend together, creating a harmonious string of color across the blackness of my closed eyes.  The terrible ache subsided, and my thoughts emptied themselves.  I felt my tensed muscles relax, letting the melody gracefully snake its way through my brain so that hopefully the memory of it would stick with me forever.  I was nine then, and as the same melody brings the colors to the back of my vision while I drive myself to work, I can’t help bringing my hand to my right ear, reaching up to touch the device that has become an intrinsic part of my life.
I was born virtually deaf, and I went through preschool in a numb, soundless haze.  My mother taught me the basics of ASL before the alphabet, so I communicated my first coherent thoughts in sign rather than sound.  I got a cochlear implant when I was nine.  We wouldn’t have been able to afford it had we not been funded through one of the hospital charity networks, through which my mom had tried for two years to procure the funds for my surgery.  I was one of those kids you see on daytime television in the commercials for those charities, asking for donations from a public clueless to our plight.
Before surgery was ever a possibility, I never spent too much time thinking about my disability.  Sure, farther back than I can remember someone had to have told me that I was different, but it’s hard to experience loss when you don’t know what you’re missing.  I was young, and my mind was occupied with other things.  When my parents had asked me if I wanted to hear, I signed yes, of course- even though I had no way of knowing what hearing was.  If I had known to the full extent what the surgery entailed, I might not have been so sure- I woke up eighteen hours after going into the hospital with a splitting headache and a metal device attached to my head, which, for a nine year old, was quite terrifying.   I have no memory of the first days afterwards. After a week of recovery, the nurse turned on my implant, and I heard my first sounds over the course of broken up segments that day, with my parents and the nurses watching me sitting up in a chair with bulky headphones over my ears.  My surgery had been successful from their point of view- I would need minimal recovery time, they would only keep me in the coming weeks to get me used to what I would be hearing in my everyday life.  I spent a rather sedentary two weeks afterward with the headphones softly playing different soundtracks- mainly nature sounds at first, and later speech and car engines- tentatively introducing me to the world of the hearing.  I don’t quite know what I had expected, but, inevitably, I was surprised by the sensation of it.  I only saw my parents intermittently during my 3 weeklong stay at the hospital after the surgery, and when I did they only stopped to see me briefly and meet with the doctor.  I thought it was strange and was a bit hurt that they didn’t spend more time at the hospital with me-I learned later that my father had lost his job.  The housing market collapse and the DOW plunge were all over the news then, but it hadn’t yet become real.  The timing couldn’t possibly have been worse.  They’re a few years away from being able to retire now, and all three of us are looking forward to it.  We pulled through by the skin of our teeth, just like many others.  I just wish we had had more time to be a family.
They let me go on December 14th.  By then I was getting used to everything, not cringing when I heard my feet thump on the floor as I walked, letting my guard down so that insignificant sounds began to go unnoticed.  Despite the cold and foreign feel of the device now on my head, I took comfort in the fact that I could turn it off at will, though the doctor urged that I keep it turned on as much as possible.  As we walked out of the hospital into the blustering wind, the twinkling red and green lights shining through the fog made me glad that at least I wasn’t blind, though no amount of light would have been able to illuminate my parent’s overcast moods.  They tried their best to be optimistic, despite the fact that neither of them are really that type.
When we were going home in the car that day, mom turned to face me from the front seat and signed “Are you ok?” 
Their mood was contagious.  I began to close my fist, signing “no”, but stopped and shrugged my shoulders.  They both said later that they wished the day could have been happier.
The ride home was terrifying, despite the therapy I had been in for weeks now.  When dad started the car at first I jumped and squeezed my mom’s hand tightly, trembling a bit as I got into the back seat.  By the time we had driven the forty minutes back to our house, the grumbling and banging and sudden bursts of noise had nearly reduced me to tears.  I couldn’t help myself.  Mom and Dad both tried to look back and give me a reassuring smile, pat my leg, but even a nine year old could tell it was a silly façade plastered onto their reddened sleep deprived eyes and countenances worn grey by daily stress and fatigue. 
I realized when we got home that I had tensed up the whole way and relaxed my muscles as I got out of the car with my backpack slung over my shoulder.   Our small two bedroom house in the Boston suburbs had never looked more welcoming.  Inside, the bills and insurance papers cluttering our small dining room table had been pushed aside and a wrapped purple box had been placed in the center, along with a couple balloons tied to the chairs.  I smiled at my parents and we all hugged.
“A little surprise”, signed my dad, whose sign was slower and stiffer than my mom’s.  “We’re so proud of you.”
He said the words aloud too, and it was the strangest thing to hear sound coming out of lips that had once been mute to me.  He had a deep, booming voice that was somehow quiet at the same time.  It seemed like the sound of him and the sight of him were disconnected, like his voice was a random clip played inside my head. Despite my resistance to learning English, I was bothered that the sound made sense to everyone else but me.  That nagging feeling of being left out would bother me enough to give me the drive to stick with speech therapy all through my elementary and middle school years.
I sat down on one of the chairs, getting up on my knees so that I was level with the box, and meticulously separated the wrapping paper from it, taking off the strips of tape and neatly unfolding the paper and setting it to the side of the box, which was plain on the outside.  My dad laughed a little bit, which was rare. 
Inside was a Bose CD player and some of my parent’s CDs.  There were a few brand new ones wrapped in thin plastic, and others in mismatched cases with my mom’s print-cursive hybrid writing on the covers.  Most of the new ones were supposed to be relaxing soundtracks, like the nature sounds they played at the hospital, but there was classical (including Canon), some more instrumental stuff, and, as a joke, one of my dad’s old ACDC albums.  I smiled and laughed, which was also rare.  My voice sounded foreign to my new ears.
For a time after that, I became unsettlingly reclusive.  My mom was worried for me, because I was barely able to go outside without being shaken up by the sound of a car speeding by on the road or the sound of the garbage truck as it came around the corner, lurching and bellowing like a monster of my worst imagination.  The doctor said I would have a hard time adjusting, that it was normal, but I became a different person.  My mind went to dark places at night when my CD player was off and I sank into a deep pit of pessimism for reasons I couldn’t understand then.  My parents began checking on me more often to make sure that my implant was turned on, because they could tell that the allure of silence was tempting me more and more.  I remember one particularly horrible day a month or so after I had come home when I had to follow my mom around on errands because we couldn’t afford a babysitter.  We were walking down the narrow sidewalks downtown when the sirens came up from behind us, screaming so loud that I thought my head was going to explode.  I broke down right in the middle of the street, my hand fumbling with the switch on my implant as my mom shepherded me away from the noise until it faded into an indiscriminate echo in the distance.  Even with the sound turned off, I could still hear the echo of it in my head, splitting through my skull.  I felt as brittle as the thin branches of those January trees coated in frost, so easy to snap.  The incident comes to mind as I make a right turn, pulling over onto the side of the road as an EMS crew comes barreling around the corner.  I cringe at the memory of how terrible that sound used to be.
Six months later, the end of what would’ve been fourth grade for me had come and gone, leaving me stranded on the remote island of intensive speech and developmental therapy as the sea of my peers moved on around me, oblivious to my presence.  I would make up what I missed with my speech teacher and my mother, who was putting her degree to use subbing at elementary schools and summer school programs while my dad tried to find work.  It was strange having her gone and him with me, as it was usually the other way around.  For a time, it worked.  My attitude had drastically improved, my nine year old mind still being malleable to the hands of change.  I was able to go outside more, and found that I enjoyed being near the ocean, away from the city.  The first time I heard the waves down on  Massachusetts coast is one of the best memories I have of that time, as it was on a day when all of us were together, an hour away from home and blissfully disconnected from life, if only for a few hours. 
   I still used ASL primarily to communicate, but was beginning to overcome some of the speech hurdles that infants master within three years of age.  I hated the sound of my own voice.  My speech was sluggish and often incoherent, though I was actually proficient at learning new words and understanding the rules of English.  Maddeningly, it was all in my head and I easily got frustrated when I couldn’t pronounce something. 
Had I been left to my own devices, I probably still wouldn’t speak English today.  I was perfectly fine with being limited to sign, irritated, even, that the world expected me to conform to its way of expression.  When I was dragged into the endless monotony of rigorous speech sessions day after day, I would treat the teacher with open bitterness and derision.  It was exhausting to go in every day and struggle over every pronunciation, stutter through every sentence as I grew humiliated under the watchful gaze of the teachers.   And so I grew terrified of speaking.  The adults were just as persistent as I was stubborn, which only worsened matters. 
My mother was the driving force in my learning, sometimes not responding to me until I spoke English instead of signed to her.  We had everything all in order for me.  I was to go to the special needs school that I went to before for fifth grade in the fall and slowly integrate back into the regional middle school when the time came.  I was fine with that, mostly because I enjoyed going to my old school with my best friend, Sarah, who is also deaf. To this day we’re still close, meeting up in coffee shops like our own moms used to and signing to each other, using our own “secret language.”  She’s asked me before what it’s like to hear, hearkening back to the time when we used to wonder together.  I feel bad that I can’t give her a good answer.
I went back to my special needs school some fateful day in mid September.  My mom left me outside the elementary building after hugging me goodbye and telling me to be confident.  I knew she would wait in the parking lot for some minutes afterward, trying not to worry but being too scared to leave me until she would barely make it to work on time.  I remember standing at the door, just barely tall enough to see through the narrow window into my classroom.  Their eyes all met mine as soon as I tentatively cracked open the door, and my teacher stopped giving morning directions to smile encouragingly at me as I tried to be like my parents and act like everything was ok.  I dimly heard her voice talking in that singsong way that elementary teachers do, but I understood nothing.  All I saw was their eyes looking in unison from my face to the side of my head, at the part of me that wasn’t me.  And I knew from then on that I was different.
After that day I was never quite at home with the special needs kids.  The many friends I had once had seemed to drift away, with the exception of Sarah.  I was, as my mother liked to point out, no longer disabled, but I was confused and hurt by the lack of support from my peers.  I would hear them mumble “robot” when they thought I couldn’t hear, and they seemed almost eager to exploit whatever still hindered my own development as if to satisfy their jealousy over my “fixable” disability.  One boy, Owen, who was paralyzed from the waist down, laughed at my stutter every time I was forced to speak in class.  I was miserable, and more and more often I would get caught with my implant turned off.  I promised my mother I would keep it on if she let me take piano lessons, which became a sort of escape from the last of my dismal year in fifth grade.
That summer, I went deaf entirely.  I simply decided one night to turn off my ears and go back to the way things were before.  I tried not to let anybody know, though my mother was bound to figure out sooner or later.  I became quite good at lip reading and played piano nonetheless, all the while relishing the strange sensation of talking soundlessly, feeling the peculiar vibration when I put my hand to my throat but seeming to exhale empty space instead of words.  I thought a lot about Beethoven that summer, the near deaf musician who produced masterpieces from what little sound he had.  Beethoven was a little mental, and maybe so was I, back then, but I needed my silence.  Despite the more frequent worried talks my mom was having with my doctors and the way I seemed to repel the people who were once my friends, that silent summer I rebuilt my happiness.
During a long talk in which my mother was forced to revert to using sign language and I patiently assured her and the doctor that I was of sound mental state, we debated in sign about my preparedness for middle school.  They were worried.  I was too, but I was still young enough that I could shove it off to the far corner of my mind and not let it bother me until the last minute.  Which is exactly what I did right up until the minute I stood outside of the doors of my new middle school and turned on my implant for the first time in some two and a half months, jumping a little as I heard the obnoxious ambience of buses and cars and people drowning out my thoughts once again.  My mother brought her hand worriedly to mine, but I squeezed it and let go, hugging her goodbye just as I had done a year and a half ago when I went back to school after my surgery. 
That first day I was acutely aware of the stares piercing the side of my head, wilting inside whenever I caught someone looking at me funny and watched them awkwardly look away.  I knew I would never fit in, but it was hard being reminded all day.  I was paranoid and a bit jittery, to say the least, but I managed to slip in with a friendly looking group of girls at lunch.  From that point on I knew I would survive, if just that. 
After only six months I had more friends than I ever had before, though Sarah was always closest to me.  By eighth grade I had cut back on speech to only once a week and excelled in all my classes.  In the eyes of the nurses and doctors who had watched me grow up, I was a success story, though that’s something I will never quite believe.  As I progressed into high school, music became less of a hobby and more of a passion.  I began working harder to further my skills as a musician and it became my goal to go to college for music and play in some of the best orchestras in the world. 
Despite my love of music, many times now I will find myself alone, gingerly fingering the switch on my head and sliding it the some 5 millimeters into the off position, immersing myself in the thick blanket of complete silence.  I will pick up my violin or hold the bow to the strings of my cello or sit down at the bench of the piano and play by memory alone, watching the movements of my fingers and letting my mind wander to other places.  I long to do that now as I grab my violin case from the back of my car, wishing I could tune out and calm the snake of nerves in my stomach that tightens its grip as I turn and face the imposing doors of Boston’s own Symphony Hall.  But now is not the time to play in silence.  Now more than ever I feel like I stand between two worlds, one foot in each, never more than halfway on one side or the other.  I’m right there now, leaning into the world of the hearing ever more while always having my feet planted in the realm of the deaf.