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A letter to Alexander Graham Bell, from his deaf wife, Mabel.
Standing before the priest
I still felt as though we were playing dress-up. Lace soft like your breath across my skin.
No longer trying to hide the glow I have around you. Your tie matched the green flecks in
your eyes, and I didn't need sound to feel the music. I learned to see the priest wrap
his lips around the word "husband". A question suspended between us. I know what comes next.
We practiced this for hours in front of the mirror. My lips dancing to no music, desperately
struggling to match their shape to yours. But today, no one will notice their careful
movement. They will be listening to the one thing I cannot control. Your fingers gently
cover mine, but I know this isn't because you cannot wait to touch me. Our audience
sighs, imagining us two perfect plastic lovers created simply to adorn every white cake,
but really, the heat from your fingers wrapped around my wrist was more like a gag, a reminder
that my hands have no place in speaking. This was the first moment I ever felt the weight
of the word disability. Saying the words "I do" without ever hearing them is like carrying
a stranger's child. This life was never mine. But you sure taught me how to act in it, fed
me all the right lines. Alec, did you ever regret teaching me to read lips? You waited
for the moments when my back was turned to tell our friends that you believed deaf people
weaken society. Did you picture me a stray puppy, something you picked up off the streets, a
charity case that painted you a better person for investing in? It's ironic that you will
later be remembered as the pioneer of communication when you banned the use of my language from
schools, called it barbaric, isolated deaf children in hopes they wouldn't reproduce
for fear of spreading this disease. Once, after a fight, you rushed to the bathroom
and threw yourself underwater, muffled the sounds of a world I never knew in hopes that
a minute in the bathtub could honestly compare to a lifetime of trying to read a different
language written only in the curves of your lips. When I said we couldn't communicate,
I wasn't talking about the silence. Our marriage was always this: underwater, drowning.
By the time you get this letter, we will both be long gone. You were meant for great things, Alec.
I was not one of them.