Hearing Loss.

I thought I was going deaf.

"What?"

Almost every time anyone would talk to me, I'd respond with the most annoying word in the English language when you're trying to talk to somebody.

"What?"

But I wasn't going deaf. There was no way I could be. I was only seventeen. And sometimes, everything sounded fine, but then sometimes, I couldn't hear shit. I tried to blame the problem on Ashley because oftentimes it would emerge when I was with her or right after. But this just made her mad and sometimes violent towards me. It continued like this until one day I came to realize that the problem was only occurring in my left ear - which meant that if I was going deaf, it was only in that ear - not both. So I wouldn't be deaf, really, anyways. But of course, I still didn't completely believe that was the case. So Ashley, being the more sensible of her and I, somehow quickly figured out the problem.

"It's earwax," she said. "It can build up in there real bad and then you can't hear. You're gonna have to clean it out."

To which I responded,

"What?"

"There's these drops that I have that you can put in your ear. It'll break up the earwax, and then there's this thing that squirts water in your ear that flushes it all out."

"What?"

So one day she laid me on my side on my bed and dropped these little drops of stuff into my ear and told me that I couldn't move for ten minutes. It sizzled and popped and burned and I didn't move for ten minutes, although I really wanted to. It's very difficult for me to stay still at all, so ten minutes was torture. The whole time Ashley had to pet my head, like I was a kitten or something, to keep me still. Then when ten minutes were up she stuck a cotton ball in my ear and walked me to the bathroom, where, conveniently, I for some reason already had a little blue ear-flusher-cleaner-outer thingy in my medicine cabinet. She took the cotton ball out of my ear, threw it away, and filled up the little blue thing with warm water. It made a slurping sound as it sucked up the water. Then she made me hang me head over the bathtub, left ear down, and she shot a blast of warm water into my ear.

"OH MY GOD. OH MY FUCKING GOD," was the first thing I heard.

And then I saw.

Little yellow bits of earwax sediments on the floor of the tub beneath my ear. Some yellowed water around them. Ashley's hand holding the blue-flusher-thingy, covered in the liquid. Ashley looking disgusted. And I secretly thought it was hilarious. But I didn't say anything. I valued my life, you know.

But I still couldn't hear.

And then she repeated the process. Again. And again. More chunks of earwax would fall out into the tub and more of the nasty liquid would get all over her and her arm and occasionally my shoulder. It was warm. It was wet. It was sticky. It was awesome, in a way. She must have repeated it about five or six times before I decided I could hear again. I figured that any cloudiness of hearing was just water still in there. I thanked her repeatedly. She deserved it. I really don't think I'd ever met anyone before who would have done such a thing for me and I probably won't. Maybe my mom. Maybe anyone's mom. My mom wiped poop from my butt when I was a little kid, so I guess she gets a gold star for dealing with gross bodily clean up. But if I asked my mom to wipe my poop up now she'd probably just kick me out. Anyways, the point is that what Ashley had just done was disgusting, and I knew it was disgusting, and that I now probably owed her a really fancy dinner or something. Which I'll get to, when I have money. Shortly after everything was all cleaned up she said good-bye and went home, leaving the little bottle of drops with me, 'just in case'.

So the next morning I expected to wake up and be able to hear just fine, like I did a few weeks before.

But I didn't.

Instead I woke up and I couldn't hear shit out of my left ear. Still.

Godammit, I thought.

I looked at the clock and saw it was only 8:30 am. Way too early to ask Ashley, or anybody for that matter, for help cleaning out my aural orifice. So I decided to try it myself. I got up, put in the drops, laid on my side, waited for ten minutes, then went to the bathroom, stood over the sink, filled up the little blue-flusher-thingy with hot water, and shot that mother fucker as hard as I could into my ear. Immediately, there was a metallic, ringing sound, and I could hear everything. Then I looked into the sink and there was dark yellow liquid everywhere, and a huge chunk of earwax, about the size of the nail of my little finger, next to the drain.

Gross, I thought.

But I could hear again.

It was awesome.