a failure to communicate

This one’s about irony, language, and the kind of heartbreak that teaches you who you are when words stop working.

I’ve always believed that words could fix anything , that if you said it clearly enough, kindly enough, and truthfully enough, someone would understand.

But lately, I’m not so sure.

I’m telling you, this did my head in and it took a 17-year-old named Izzy to see the irony before I did. I’m a writer, a storyteller, an artist, an effective communicator , my entire career has been about giving shape to thought. He’s an ASL translator. His work is to bring sound from silence, to make the unheard heard, to translate the unspoken into something understood. We’re both people who take the implicit and make it explicit.

And yet, somehow, we failed to communicate.

Maybe that’s why what Izzy saw undid me the most , that two people whose work depends on understanding couldn’t understand each other. It’s a humbling kind of truth, the sort that strips away the performance of connection and leaves only the ache of recognition.

Maybe the hardest language to translate is the one between two people who stopped listening long before they stopped talking.

I’m still trying to find peace in the silence ,it tells truths words never could.

Funny how silence has a way of getting the last word.