Double Dissed

I just spent a few days with laryngitis. At its worst, I couldn't speak at all, and so I went out with a stack of index cards and a Sharpie in my pocket. Whenever someone said "hi" to me, I held up the first card, which read, "I have laryngitis." If they wanted to converse more, I could write notes on the index cards.

It was interesting navigating the world with two disabilities, one chronic that I keep less visible (having low vision) and one temporary that I chose to make visible (not being able to speak). And once we broke the ice, laryngitis had its perks. People found communicating with me to be interesting and entertaining, and I played this up, making it into something of a performance. In the park, someone offered to buy me sorbet, and then the guy selling it refused to take any money for it. When "talking" to my friend who works with visually impaired people, I wrote on a card, "We're all temporarily abled," and then she told me that this laryngitis might be more of an ability than a disability for me because I could take my time to say what I wanted to say, draw pictures, and then have a record of that correspondence.

On the way home from my night out as a laryngite, I gave out some of these cards to people, odd anthropoetic documents of my conversations with others. When the trolley reached my stop, I rang the bell, but the driver shut the doors before I could get off. I called out, "Rear door!" but he couldn't hear me because at the end of the day, I had no voice.