I can hear you.

This is my first story so please give me some feed back. Any would be welcome. I will probably make many mistakes.

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Hello.

I can speak. And I can hear. But no one else can. I am the only one. A freak of nature.

Everyone else cannot hear. They are completely deaf. They have never heard the rustle of a tree in the wind, or the slow rippling of water, sounds I'm sure many of you take for granted. I can hear all these sounds.

But I am the freak of nature because I am blind. I am completely blind. I have never seen the lush green leaves that everyone says is on the trees, nor have I seen a wave of water lapping at the edge of the sea, sights I am sure many of you also take for granted.

Maybe you want to know what I look like? I can only give you others description. My eyes are brown. You'll know what that is, I suppose. My hair is the same colour apparently. At least I match. I am tanned. Other girls are jealous. Being 'tanned' is a good quality, so they say. I can tell you I have slender fingers though, and my legs are not fat, but are not thin, my skin is relatively smooth and my knees are kind of knobbly. I can feel these things.

My story starts from when I am born. This is my life. I have always been blind, and I have always been an outcast.

My beginning:

Okay, I can't remember my birth, but I have been told about it. I was my parents first child. I was perfect. Or so it seemed. I opened my mouth and screamed and gurgled or whatever babies do. And everything was fine. Nobody noticed anything strange until I was a few months old and a friend of my parents commented on how my eyes never seemed to focus. They always stared into a point far, far away.

My parents took me to the doctors. They went through many tests. They dismissed it, I may just be not properly developed yet. A late bloomer. Give it a few weeks, they said.

But still, I gazed into somewhere, no one else could see. When I reacted to nothing, the doctors diagnosed me as the first blind person.

"It appears she cannot...see."

I was famous for a while. But not a good fame. My parents feared the journalists and the photographers. They would be at the door, waiting. Police came sometimes, to escort us and try to disperse the media, in vain. They gave up eventually. I became uninteresting.

5 years old:

I started school. I had not had any communication with other children. My parents had rarely let me out of their sight, for fear that I might get myself killed with my impediment. I was a great burden to them, but they are good people and I was their child, and they had keen parent instincts. I am very grateful to them, I suppose.

Although in some ways, perhaps I should have been left to die on the street.

It was a Monday. I have always said, good things rarely happen on a Monday. I was excited though. I rushed around my room, scrambling into my soft new polo shirt and my new pleated skirt that swung about my sturdy legs. My new shoes that were so smooth they could've been an ice rink, were pulled on and the scratchy velcro pulled over. I was ready to go.

It was just down the road, and my dad took my hand and led me down the street. My dad has the same slender fingers as me. They are not calloused like a workers' hand. It is the hand of an academic.

When we arrived the school, my hand still gripped my dad's is reassurance, as we crossed the playground. All I could hear was the scuffling of feet on the flat tarmac ground and the front door swinging on its squeaky hinges. I was used to this absent of sound. I knew there was a lot of people there. I could almost sense them.

My dad accompanied me into the building. As I stepped over the threshold, I felt that what little sound there was, was dampened. I didn't like it. My enthusiasm was immediately drained. I wanted to leave and never come back. However, my dad gently pulled me along the dusty corridors into a room full of people. I could hear them all, the adults quietly signing to their children or the other adults. And the children: their excited huffs of breath.

Then everyone grew still and I knew the teacher was signing her introductary speech. My dad took my hands and started to translate into our own little language we had tried to create.

I smiled in gratitude.

My dad left after the tour of the school. He took my hand and using our fingers, told me that he would come to pick me up at the end of the day, that he hoped I had a good time, to remember that no matter what anyone said, I was amazing. And that he loved me.

I didn't understand at first.

When the parents had all left, the teacher sat us down. The teacher tried her best. She sat me near her, to keep an eye on me. But she couldn't always pay close attention to me. And we all know that kids can be cruel.

My primary school years:

There was just shoving and exclusion at first. I got a few black eyes and other assorted bruises. I managed to hide most from my parents. I didn't want to worry them. But I couldn't hide the ones on my face and they complained many times to the school but I would not tell them anything, and of course no one owned up. My parents begged me to let them help them but I wouldn't tell them a single thing, my determination only increasing with the blows.

I kept my head down as much as possible. I got everything with indented printing so I could trace my hand upon it. I learnt to write precisely in neat straight lines from hours of practise deep into the night. The teacher would never ask me questions. I learnt the international signing so I can speak my mind, even if I can't converse with other people.

I spent a lot of time in my room. When I was not studying, as it took me much longer to do things than everyone else, I was practising something else. Something unique to the world.

Talking.

I had always heard sounds, and had attempted to describe it to my parents, but it was dismissed as an over reactive imagination. I couldn't understand when no one heard the house creak as the wind moaned outside, or no one could hear the pitter patter of typing on a keyboard.

I began to experiment. I knew we made sounds like breathing and grunting. One day I sat and tried to push out air but no sound was uttered. I tried grunting with my mouth open. This was more succesful. I soon mastered making sounds.

I delighted in this. I learnt how I could make sounds. Different sounds by changing the shape of my mouth. This was a secret though. I had learnt soon enough that I was different.