By: Alan Berger

It was not a blind date.

It was a deaf date.

I’ve always had a problem telling people, not my pets, people, how I truly feel.

There was no getting anything off my chest unless my mouth was directed to my cat’s ears.

I was still going through a divorce in my head that had begun and ended a million years ago but seemed like only yesterday, today and tomorrow.

I wanted to hold onto it and never let go even though the other party moved on, I was still having my continuous afterparty cleaning up the dishes  when there were no more dishes to clean.

I could not and did not want to cleanse myself.

Remaining in pain felt like it wasn’t over.

Like a cloud staying still over my head refusing the winds natural encouraging motions.

I was no bargain and my ex wife not one either. When you accuse someone of something and they say ,” Don’t be ridiculous,” they are lying.

I heard don’t be ridiculous so many times, it sounded like don’t be a piece of licorice.

I knew it was the end even before it had begun.

We finally told each other to take our, my way or the highways and shove them up our one-way streets.

I would like to blame my lack of communication skills on it all falling apart rather than just accept that the bottom line of any failure is and will always be that it just didn’t  workout.

Eventually I got my body to continue believing my head never would follow.

I had a healthy body and like the best decisions in life that you make are the ones where you have no choice, my decision was when you have your health, you have everything.

 Yeah, sure.

I thought I would never recover.

I was in a bookstore one day looking for something, anything, when a woman over to my left dropped a set of keys on the floor and when I did my hey lady she did not respond.

I picked them up and tried again, no reply.

I tapped on her shoulder and she turned around, looked at me, then the keys, took them and said, “Thank you so much”.

She sounded like a Dolphin.

She then handed me a card that said, “Hello, my name is Ann, I am deaf. Nice to meet you!”.

I later found out she had a few different cards for a few different occasions.

One even said, “Fuck you, leave me alone or I’ll call the cops”.

I never received that one.

I thought perhaps I had found someone I could talk to.

It also helped tremendously that she was, as they say, “Cute as a button”.

Plus, she wasn’t allergic to cats and didn’t seem allergic to me either.

We had what we later referred to as “Silent chemistry”.

I pointed to her, then pointed to me, and then made like I was throwing down a drink in my hopeful unfilled mouth.

She nodded yeah and off we went on our first and not last date.

We became an item and when we  E  mailed and texted each other to talk a bit I could hear her voice.

Her beautiful melodious non dolphin voice, but the one in her pretty head. She wrote she heard mine too.

I fell in love with love and I also fell in love with her and her with me.

Before we met, I was  falling and could not get up.

After we met, I began to rise.

While I was not the best pupil for her sign language lessons, we compensated by not being able to keep our hands off each other.

We would “Speak”, to each other when we were together thru the magic of texting with our phones like a couple of kids.

We ”Talked” about everything under the sun and over the moon. When our phones went dead I would shoot my mouth off and she would seem to enjoy just watching.

It was those times I really let my life out as I had never before with anyone except my beloved attentive kitty cat.

I make a good and bad living as a writer.

That being said, and written, and as far as my new love was concerned, I saddened myself with the cold hard fact that she could never hear the greatest voices of our times or any other times.

Dylan, Jagger, Frank and a guy named Elvis.

Not to mention Mozart.

Anyway, to me, all that counted was that this piece of beauty was the first piece of beauty I could really talk to.

One night we got really drunk by candlelight.  Without texting,  I really shot my mouth off about everything in my life from cradle to not yet grave. “Told” her about my tremendous love for her and even told the name of my precious cat. “Iron”.

She just nodded as I rambled on.

In the morning while soaking in the sun, enjoying our romantic hangovers, she sent me a text saying that   she loved me too and that Iron was an interesting name for a cat.

I guess she saw I could not figure out how she knew the name of my cat since it was without a text and just drunken babbling by candlelight.

Her next text made our future form of communication even more delicious, brighter and above all, clearer and louder.

It read  “ I Love your lips and I can read them too’’.