I Heard You, I Just Didn't Get the Words

"Sorry, what was that?”

The first time, it’s nothing.
The second, a sigh.
The third, something in your voice
changes just enough
to make me wish I’d heard you the first.

Were you even listening?

Yes.
God, yes.

I heard the sound of you.
I heard the shape of your sentence,
the rise and fall of your voice,
the impatience gathering at the edges.

But somewhere between your mouth
and the place where meaning lives,
something came apart.

A consonant disappeared.
Three words became one.
The background swallowed the middle
and left me holding a sentence
with half its pieces missing.

Sound reaches me.
Meaning doesn’t always follow.

There’s a name for it:
auditory processing and perception disorder.

A handful of letters
for the space between
I heard you
and I understood.

A childhood of ear infections,
eardrums that ruptured,
damage no one can see
when I’m standing right in front of you.

Now I lean closer.
Watch your mouth.
Piece together what I can
from context, expression,
the words I managed to catch.

Sometimes I guess correctly.
Sometimes I laugh a second too late.
Sometimes I nod
because asking again feels worse
than admitting I’m lost.

And sometimes I get it wrong
and watch your face close.

I know it’s frustrating.
I know repeating yourself is tiring.
I know it can feel like talking
to someone who isn’t paying attention.

But I am paying attention.

I’m spending so much of myself
trying to catch every word
that there’s barely anything left
to do with what the words mean.

I can watch you speak
and still lose the sentence.
I can care about what you’re saying
and still ask you to say it again.

Those things can exist together.
I wish I didn’t have to prove it.

Because every time you call me careless,
every time you ask if I’m stupid,
every time your patience runs out
before I can piece the sentence together,
I learn a little more
about how expensive it is
to need help with something
everyone else does without thinking.

I start apologizing before I ask.
Start pretending before I’m sure.
Start choosing the shame of misunderstanding
over the shame of making you repeat yourself.

And then I miss even more.

It’s a cruel little circle:
the harder I try not to inconvenience you,
the less room I have
to actually understand you.

I don’t want every conversation
to become a lesson in my own limitations.
I don’t want you to have to work
for every word you give me.

I just want you to know
that when I ask you to repeat yourself,
I’m not asking because I don’t care.

I’m asking because I do.

Because I’m here.
I’ve been here the whole time,
reaching for your meaning
through the static,
trying to make a whole sentence
out of what arrived in pieces.

I heard you.

I just didn’t get the words.

And nothing frustrates me more
than watching you mistake
the distance between those two things
for a distance between us.