🦇🔊 Sound in Nova’s World ~ The Hearing World She Can’t Turn Off 💜✨
When Nova became a vampire, sound entered her world for the very first time.
Her new body restored the physical ability to hear ~ ♡ but it did not give her an understanding of everything she was hearing. It did not turn voices into language or make unfamiliar noises instantly meaningful.
For Nova, it is almost as though the hearing world was switched on all at once ~ and she was never given a way to turn down the volume or turn it off.
Sound is always there now.
Sometimes soft.
Sometimes beautiful.
Sometimes frightening.
Sometimes far too much.
Voices reach her ears, but the words inside them do not.
Nova still relies on sign language, lip reading, facial expressions, gestures, and writing to understand what someone is saying. But even when she cannot understand their words, she often understands something else instinctively:
She can hear when a voice is gentle.
She can feel when someone is angry, frightened, playful, impatient, or trying to comfort her. The words may remain an unfamiliar stream of sound, but the emotion carried inside the voice often reaches her anyway.
A soft voice feels different from a sharp one.
Her guardians’ voices become familiar not because she understands every spoken word, but because she learns their warmth. Their rhythms. The way their voices change when they are teasing her. The quiet softness that enters them when she is frightened. The steadiness in the voices that tell her, even without understandable words:
Sound itself is something Nova has to learn.
Every noise begins as a mystery.
A door closing.
Rain against a window.
Fabric brushing against fabric.
The refrigerator humming.
A pencil scratching across paper.
The tiny click of her own fangs.
The whisper of her bare feet against the floor.
There are so many things Nova never knew made sounds at all.
Sometimes she pauses in the middle of a room because something has made a noise and she does not know where it came from. She looks around with wide eyes, trying to connect the sound to its source. She may touch an object, move it again, and listen carefully as she discovers:
She is learning the sounds of the world one little discovery at a time.
She is also learning the sounds she makes.
Her footsteps.
Her breathing.
The rustle of her clothes.
The little hum that sometimes escapes when she is comfortable.
The frightened hiss that rises instinctively when she feels cornered.
The sound of her laughter, even though laughter existed in her body long before she could ever hear it.
And the sound of her crying.
Nova has always known what it feels like to cry ~ the tightness in her chest, the shaking breaths, the tears spilling down her cheeks.
The broken little sounds of her own sobs can frighten her at first, especially when she does not immediately understand that the noise is coming from her.
Sometimes hearing herself cry makes the feeling seem even bigger.
Sometimes she presses her hands over her ears, unable to escape a sound her own body is making.
And sometimes, when someone holds her close, she slowly learns that even this sound can be met with gentleness.
Some of these discoveries delight her.
Because Nova cannot switch her hearing off, noisy places can become overwhelming very quickly. Crowded rooms, overlapping voices, traffic, barking dogs, slamming doors, alarms, shouting, and sudden crashes can blur together until she cannot separate one sound from another.
Everything reaches her at once.
There is no familiar background noise for her mind to gently push away. No lifetime of experience teaching her which sounds are harmless and which ones matter. A noise that others barely notice may feel enormous to Nova simply because it is new.
When there is too much sound, she may cover her ears, hide against someone she trusts, close her eyes, or search desperately for somewhere quiet. She may become frightened, overstimulated, tearful, or unable to focus on anyone’s face long enough to lip-read.
Sometimes she needs darkness.
Sometimes she needs stillness.
Sometimes she needs to curl against one of her guardians and listen only to something familiar ~ ♡ a voice she knows, a heartbeat beneath her ear, or the quiet rhythm of someone breathing beside her.
Nova does not love every sound.
Some sounds hurt.
Some make her flinch.
Some frighten her before she even understands what caused them.
But sound is not only frightening.
Nova keeps a growing collection of sounds she loves ~ ♡ little pieces of the hearing world that have become soft and magical to her.
Water swirling around her during a warm bath.
Bubbles popping against the surface.
Her bare feet padding across the floor.
Rain when she is safely inside.
Crickets singing softly around her beneath the stars.
The familiar voices of the vampires who care for her.
The steady sound of their heartbeats when she rests her head against their chests.
The music and gentle sounds of Sky: Children of the Light as she flies through clouds, glides across glowing kingdoms, and explores beside other Sky kids.
And AURORA ~ ♡ the first singer Nova ever truly heard.
During the Sky × AURORA concert, sound became something more than noise. AURORA’s voice moved through Nova’s new world of hearing like light. As the lyrics appeared on the screen, Nova could follow the words with her eyes while experiencing the sound of them for the very first time. Surrounded by dreamlike colors, stars, spirits, and thousands of Sky children, she discovered that sound could carry wonder even when she did not experience language through it in the same way others did.
Music did not need to become spoken meaning.
Nova is still building her relationship with sound. She is still learning what the world sounds like, what she sounds like, and which noises she wants to keep close to her heart.
Her hearing does not erase her Deafness.
It does not replace her language or make spoken words her natural way of understanding the world.
It simply gives her another sensory world to explore ~ one she never asked for, cannot turn off, and must learn at her own pace.
Sometimes sound is too big.
Sometimes it is confusing.
But sometimes, sound is bathwater swirling around her hands. It is a familiar heartbeat beneath her cheek. It is the music of Sky carrying her through the clouds.
Sometimes sound is AURORA singing beneath a sky full of stars.
And sometimes, very gently, sound becomes something Nova can love. 💜🦇✨
