Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found by Rebecca Alexander, Sascha Alper Page B

both loved we would look ateach other, and, even if we were across the room from one another, we would burst simultaneously into loud song. It felt so good to laugh and sing with friends, and, best of all, I could finally dance again. My friends and I would have impromptu dance parties, music blasting from our dorm rooms, caught up in the joy of our newfound independence. There is something about singing and dancing with my girlfriends that is totally irreplaceable; it gives me a feeling of such delight and freedom to be in the middle of a throng of joyful, dancing bodies. Even the stupidest keg party was made fun as soon as a great song came on and we could take over whatever space there was to get our groove on. We would sing and dance everywhere we went, and I loved it all the more for having not been able to do it for so long. Already, the sunshine and work and fun of college were helping the months of being immobile fade from my mind, though the scars, and the pain, would remain.
    • • • •
    Chronic pain is an insidious thing. While my accident was certainly an important lesson in patience and perseverance, the physical pain won’t ever be gone. My back, hand, and foot have never been the same, and while I have tried not to let it stop me from doing anything that I really want to, I struggle with it every day. Like my diminished vision and hearing, it is something that I will always have to live with. As with the tinnitus, I try to tune it out, and sometimes I can. It’s amazing what the body can get used to. I try to keep it to myself, because, as Grandma Faye would say, nobody wants to hear it. Complaining has never gotten me anywhere, so I try my best not to.

19
    T he summer after the accident, when I was nineteen and had just finished my second quarter at UC Santa Barbara, I returned to Skylake Yosemite Camp as a counselor. Cody came with me. He was in college at San Diego State, and we had gotten together a few times that spring, making trips to visit one another, and were a couple again that summer. It felt almost like being resurrected to go back to my old life, but with a joy and appreciation I couldn’t have imagined before. As happy as Skylake had always made me, to now be able to do things I thought I might never do again, to be fully alive and back in the world, made me happier than I had ever been. And to be with Cody again, though we both knew that it was only temporary, an interlude together between our own separate lives, felt good, familiar and comfortable and right.
    It was the last summer I still had enough hearing to wake up to the sounds of birds. I could hear their individual songs, including the trill of my beloved Beatrice, though they were fainter, of course. The next significant decline in my hearing came just a fewmonths later, and I would never again be able to hear my morning birds without my hearing aids. Even with them, my discrimination—which is another part of hearing loss, being able to distinguish similar sounds from one another—would never be good enough again to hear them distinctly.
    I was a swim counselor, my eyes and ears still strong enough to scan the water for any signs of trouble. Shallow nineteen-year-old that I was, I had mostly requested swimming because I wanted to be on the docks next to the water so I could work on my tan, but it turned out that I also loved to swim. The coolness calmed the ache in my foot and felt wonderful on my mostly recovered body. Swimming was exercise that was demanding without being painful, and it was that summer that I really felt my body come fully back to life.
    Each morning I woke early, before reveille; put on my bathing suit; and left my hearing aids behind. I’d head down the swim trail to the still silent, empty lake—no screaming kids or boats roaring yet—where the water was still calm, and you could see just the gentlest ripple as the water lapped lazily at the rocks along the tip of the shore. I would slip in, the