music

Two and a bit years after getting the cochlea implant, I still have funny feelings about music. Most of the time, it doesn't occur to me to listen to music in the background, I've gotten so used to not having it there. It doesn't seem like all that long ago that it would've appeared an utterly foreign concept - me living my life and not having music as background filler, as a part of my taped letters to faraway friends, or as inspiration for my writing. But very soon after I lost my remaining hearing, I learnt to shut out the idea of music, because it was just too painful waking up from dreams with songs in my head and believing for a few minutes that I could still hear them, then having to remember that I was deaf and might never hear anything again.

These days, a lot of music sounds okay. Sometimes I have to concentrate to follow new things, and certain sounds, like songs with lots of electic guitar, are just always going to be impossible. On the whole, music sounds good; I can sometimes even just sit back and enjoy it.

But for some reason I choose not to try and sit back and enjoy music. It's strange, when I think about it - most people given a second chance to have something they thought they'd lost forever would grab it with both hands and never let go. Maybe it's because hearing music again still feels so overwhelming, a precious gift I never dared think I would be given. Often I find it hard to listen to songs I've known for a long time without wanting to cry with joy that I can hear them again, and sadness that many people who get cochlea implants don't get this chance. The implants are primarily geared towards picking up speech, so what I've gotten is very rare.

Sometimes music creeps up on me by stealth, though, and I'm surprised at how easily I adjust to hearing new things, to connecting with the emotions in a song I've never heard before and which I'm probably not comprehending in a way most people would classify as 'hearing' to begin with. Like today, I was flipping through the channels trying to find something good on television, and I happened across an interview with Wendy Matthews. She got up and sang a couple of times, and one of the songs was a cover of Gordon Lightfoot's Early Morning Rain. Something about the song caught me up, and it was as though I wasn't wearing crappy sneakers on a carpeted cement foundation; instead my feet were planted firmly in the earth back in a paddock in the country, with lots of people who know me and care about me around. I know that sounds corny and probably a bit naff, but it's the best way to describe how I felt.

It's after moments like that that I wish, more than anything, that I could just embrace music again without any hesitation or fear. But I can't. I can't undo the eighteen months I spent in silence and what that did to me. Every silver lining has a cloud, so it seems.