I hear the rainbow calling. Calling me to join it, to join its shimmer. In this silent world of mine where no sound penetrates my ears, still I hear the rain bow call. I hear it when other do not. It is there in my moments of darkness when I feel alienated from this world, I hear it. Hear it from the depths of my being. I saw the rainbow the summer I turned six. It was there gleaming in the sky in its brilliant colours, it was solid and translucent at the same time. I clearly remembered hearing a song, a deep song which came from within the earth or perhaps it came from the sky. The next day, I woke with a fever, it burnt away all noise from the rest of the world, and it burnt the song forever into my being. The moment I found this precious meaning is also the moment I lost contact with all others. It was from that moment on that people became gaping fish, always gaping in hunger-- hunger for meaning, hunger for contact, hunger for love,hunger for sex, hunger for words, hunger for sound, hunger for music. And this hunger became forever out of reach for me, because in my world of solitude, the last thing I recall from this world of hunger is the call of that rainbow. The hunger became yearning for me. To hunger is to suffer in a lack, to hunger is to absolve pain itseslf, because hunger is blind, it feeds on and devours even itself, it is to dwell in pain without the recognition of it. To yearn is to live on that pain, the pain is its food, it exists only so long as the pain exists. The pain is yearning's contract, without it, yearning ceases. Hungry people do not recognize yearning, everything becomes food. The fish pulled out of the water in the massive nets are food to the hungry, most do not see the yearning of the fish struggling so hard to breathe, they dance that impossible death dance of theirs, yearning to return to the sea. Because people have lost their yearning, all they will ever know is hunger.

People approach people of my kind with wary. It is not our silence that they dislike, it is our quietness they fear. Silence is a lack of sound, quietness is a state of being. They look upon us with pity that we can never understand the meaning of melody. But even now, I hear it in the song I heard as a little girl, when I saw that rainbow. It is there when the earth rains, those droplets like musical notations on a score, touching me in its special way, arousing secret parts of my skin and being. It is the random dance of little girls I see on the street, their little feet tapping knowledge of innocence and life into the earth beneath. It is the life inside me that grows each day with defiance and strength, calling out to the world beyond its darkness with its staccatos hums in its heartbeat. It is in the way the man I love touch me, his lips like a summer breeze after a fever passes, the calm coolness and a passing heat. There is melody in everything I do. There is melody in life. People tiptoe around me and the life inside me. What if the child will not be able to hear, what if it will? Which is the cause for celebration, which the cause for grief? If I can speak I will tell them to listen, listen to the rainbow and understand that deafness does not exist, but only as a hunger for melody.