My Story

It was silent the day I was born, but the sun setting outside the hospital was loud red and orange. My father would say it was a day as beautiful as the day of creation.

My father and mother were quiet people, having a deaf child didn’t change much of their day to day. Their love came with a confident understanding, and a deep acceptance of each other. I grew up in a home much different than the place I now write this story from.

My surroundings now are skyscrapers and waves of people. When I walk through the streets of New York I like to think my father once walked with the same curiosity at each corner I turn. He had lived here in his youth, his own father had brought him here from Mexico.

It was a time when fame was promised to those who could dream it into reality. People persuaded by song lyrics of the late Frank Sinatra, if you could make it in New York, you could make it anywhere, moved to the big city to try their luck.

My grandfather believed he was one of the few who could make it. My father would say his father was a hopeless romantic, and life loved him back. My grandfather, who I never met, became well known in New York. He’d collect crowds of people to hear him sing, they had found someone who could voice their deepest longings.

In the time my father lived in New York with my grandfather, he would walk around the city and he’d imagine he was alone, the only person walking amongst skyscrapers. He felt it was all a dream that had come true, after all he was his father’s greatest fan.

And then one day, as quickly as dreams begin, it faded away.

My grandfather was murdered one night by men who had heard of money he kept in his apartment. They had found only some of his money and fled at the sounds of sirens.

My father would come home that night to a blood stained floor and red and blue lights. To keep him safe from anyone else who may have thought he knew where the rest of my grandfather’s money was hidden he was sent back to his country.

The murderers were never caught and no money was reported found in the apartment.

My father returned to Mexico, as he had left, poor. He was sent to an orphanage and this is where he met my mother. In his teens, my father had met the love of his life.

And years later, their child now sits here in an apartment I’d imagine similar to the one my grandfather had lived in. With a beautiful view, and writing from a black notebook this story, this story that led me to have in my pocket twenty thousand dollars.

As a deaf child, I found sounds in books, life came alive in the words strung by authors I’d never met. I wanted to know every story that was ever written, and I grasped with eagerness all the stories my parents signed and wrote for me.

My life was a dream. We lived surrounded by green hills that looked to be on fire as the sunset rested on its tops. All I had ever known was Mexico, and the stories my dad told me of New York. I would imagine myself as him walking through skyscrapers as the only person there.

One day, as I came home from school, I had a story to tell my parents, of an injured bird our professor had allowed us to care for. Today we had finally released it, and it flew away.

I soon had forgotten my story, for as all dreams begin they also fade. Police met me at my door that day, and an interpreter signed to me that my parent's car had been hit by another car and their car had fallen off a cliff.

I was never able to hear from birth, but that day my whole world silenced itself into tangible darkness.

I was 18 when my parents were killed, and as I lay in their bed I fell into a dream. I dreamt of myself in New York, and I saw my grandfather singing. I could not hear him, but I could feel the emotions of the crowd. How they felt what he sang, and I saw my parents sitting on a bench, my mother’s head on my father’s shoulder, and he saw me and smiled at me.

I awoke the next morning in my parent's room. Looking for anything that could bring me closer to them, and I found this black notebook that I now write from.

Inside of the notebook was twenty thousand dollars, the money that the men who had broken into my grandfather’s apartment did not find, but the words inside the notebook are what I truly hold as a treasure.

In the black notebook, were pages, and pages of my father’s writings. Stories that he had written about my grandfather in New York, and memories that he had collected of me growing up. On the page where the money was, there was a small paragraph.

“My son, watching you grow has been the most beautiful story of my life. My father fell in love with his music, and with that love he created art. I fell in love with your mother, and we had you. Your life has been the most beautiful piece of art I have come to witness. You may not hear my words, but I write them here so you may know that I am with you always as your biggest fan. One day, I hope you may see the city your grandfather fell in love with, but my greatest hope for you is that the stories you live will outnumber the pages in this notebook. I love you my son.”

I am writing in the last pages of this black notebook now, and my parents' stories live tangibly in the first pages of this notebook. It’s almost as if I continue their story. The money my father left for me has allowed me to fly out of Mexico and see new worlds. I cannot hear the noise this city produces, but I walk amongst skyscrapers as if I was the only man here, and in my hands I carry a black notebook.