Page 3 of State of Mind

She didn’t like him, but she was determined to raise him with the same cultural values as everyone else in their long legacy of Deaf identity. It was the one thing about his childhood he didn’t regret.

Wilder’s voice was used for unintentional sound—crying, laughter, screaming at the top of his lungs as he ran through fields. And no one ever noticed, and it never mattered.

But he was an outsider. The Deaf school wouldn’t take him, and with good reason, but it forced him to endure a culture he just fundamentally didn’t understand.

His mainstream school sent him to hours of speech therapy, and the teachers there were frustrated because he was capable of spoken English, but it didn’t make any sense to him. He would sit in lessons for hours and try to repeat the things they told him, and he didn’t know why, because it was so much easier to just sign.

He was tired of being punished, tired of being forced through sentence after sentence until his throat hurt, and his hands ached from squeezing his fingers tight so he wouldn’t reply with his hands. He wanted it to stop, wanted to go to school with his sister, with the other Deaf kids because that was where he belonged.

Except, that wasn’t where he belonged.

“You’re hearing, and you need to learn to function like a normal person,” his speech pathologist told him when he finally found the words to make her understand why he was so damn miserable. He was five, and he was so alone, and he was so lost.

“Normal people use words like this,” she said.

He still didn’t understand, and if that’s what normal was, he didn’t want it.

If this was normal, then normal was bad.

Normal was wrong.

He was in college by the time he realized that his mother’s opinion of him was not the rule, it was the exception. He wasn’t allowed to play with the other hearing kids Deaf parents had. CODA was a filthy word in his house—a word that meant wrong, and broken, and unchangeable. He used to fantasize about waking up with all of his hearing gone and he’d cry, and his mother would hug him, and finally, things would make sense.

He would be wanted, he would fit in, he would have a place in his family.

By the time he learned that her opinions were small, and cruel, and reviled amongst her peers, the damage was done. At Deaf events on campus, he met CODA who frowned when he asked how they managed through all the pain.

Deaf adults gave in to their urges to hug him—total strangers offering affection where he’d been starved of it so desperately his entire life. They sat him down and told him that she was wrong, not him. That there is a line between lamenting that cultural divide between yourself and your child—and the abuse that he suffered at her hands.

It made him feel sick to understand that his entire life had been a lie. It made him want to tear his hair out when he finally had words to label her for the way she had treated him for most of his life, because none of those words changed anything. Abusive—she was abusive, and he was abused, and it didn’t matter, because nothing would erase the damage she’d done.

His freshman year was a mess after that. He found his way into the LGBTQ+ club, found his way into the Deaf club. He searched for somewhere that made him feel like he could finally put those shattered pieces of his identity together in a way that gave him form and structure—but he felt too fragile to trust himself.

He was lonely. He knew, deep down, he pushed people away out of fear, because there was no telling who was hiding cruelty behind a kind smile and a handful of careful words. He avoided thinking about things like therapy and doctors and help, because it would mean having to re-live the last nineteen years of his life, and he wasn’t strong enough for that.

Wilder was trying to be braver, but there was no way to hide his vulnerability. He didn’t know how to stop himself from acting like every bit of kind attention was a gift. And it was only a matter of time before someone took advantage.

It happened in a bar—one of the few on campus that often ‘forgot’ to check IDs at the door. He and a couple of his friends from his Chem class were nursing beers and trying to look like they were older and more mature. Wilder thought maybe if he could pretend just enough, someone would be willing to look past all the battered and bruised bits of his insides and find patience enough to love him in spite of it.

He caught a set of small, blue eyes across the bar. Thin lips curved into a smile, long fingers traced a circle around the rim of a pint glass. Wilder was hooked, and there was no one around at the time with enough experience to tell him that someone like Scott—someone with dead eyes and a cruel mouth—was only going to ruin him.

Men like Scott were predators, they made it their mission to recognize those subtle signs of someone who wouldn’t run—someone who had been conditioned to be grateful for the scraps they were given.

Someone like him.

It only took a few words, a few compliments, and Wilder was gone. Scott went home with him, and somewhere between their first and third date, he stopped leaving. And it was good at first—just enough to disarm Wilder. Just enough to convince him that all he needed in the world was Scott in his bed at night. Wilder had been desperate for someone to validate his existence, and Scott fucking him into the mattress—no matter how rough it was or how much it hurt—did just that.

But it didn’t last. The scraps of kindness evaporated and left behind Scott’s temper, and his possessiveness, and his paranoia. Wilder managed to graduate by the skin of his teeth, because Scott wouldn’t stop accusing him of flirting with the other students, the TAs, and the professors. His grades dropped, but he scraped together enough credits to walk that May, his parents and sister missing from the crowd, and was welcomed afterward by the coldness in Scott’s eyes.

And yet, he stayed.

He got a job, and they got a new apartment. Scott spent Wilder’s money—keeping them constantly broke. He was out all night and came home angry and made Wilder pay for whatever had gotten him worked up. The carefully hidden bruises became more visible, the too tight grips became violent. He lived with it—his health failing. He was dizzy all the time, his ears ringing all the time.

He couldn’t eat, his insomnia raged, and every time he brought it up to Scott, the man just laughed and told him to suck it up. The unease in his gut grew to full-blown terror, and it formed into a quiet, unacknowledged belief that Scott was probably going to kill him one day.

And still, he stayed.

He had no idea why, no matter how often he asked himself. He knew he should pack his bags and run as far and as fast as he could. But he had nothing. Scott had met his parents once, and his mother had told him across the table in sign language that Scott didn’t understand, if he continued in the relationship, he had no support. His mother had made him choose in that moment, so he had.

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