flying and talking

I’ve been losing my voice over the past few days. Today it was gone. I think it is on vacation in Hawaii. I think the weather from Hawaii was on vacation in Palos Heights today. We benefitted from the tourism.

So anyway, my voice is gone. I never realized how many people I chat with every day and how important working vocal chords are for those interactions. My friends thought my whispering amusing, yet they sympathized.

In a noisy environment I was trying to sign what I was trying to say. It wasn’t working. My friend intervened and said, “She can’t talk.”

“Why not?”

I tried to explain, but when they heard the first frog-croak noise they said, “Oh! You really can’t talk.” So true.

What if I could never talk again. What if I had that strange disease that systematically shuts down your vocal chords. What if there was a reason for my building interest in sign language. What if I had to decide to be an author instead of a teacher.
What if I could never sing again.

So it was forty-five minutes before class started, I had a fifteen minute presentation due, and I had no voice to speak of. That’s when I realized that the wind had slammed my door shut so hard it had locked itself and all my materials were inside.
Thank God for suitemate’s friends, bobby pins, and a sympathetic professor.

And by the way, I had a dream that I learned how to fly. It was rather easy. In my dream I thought, “Millennia ago scientists were trying to figure out how people could fly. But they gave up and made planes to fly for them. If they had only known more about aerodynamics, they would have seen how easy it is to fly just with your own body.”

Then I woke up and found out that those giver-uppers were right and that I couldn’t talk.

If you had to say what you say in a whole different way,
what would you use? 
If you had to give up something to speak,
what would you lose?
If you had a choice between flying and talking, 
what would you choose?