"My gift is my song,
And this one's for you...

And you can tell everybody,
This is your song.

It may be quite simple, but
now that it's done...

I hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind
That I put down in the words,

How wonderful
Life is
Now you're in the world."

-Elton John

Tom Elsire was born a strapping young boy in the Year of Our Lord 1976. He cried loud with both lungs burning in that painful first draw of harsh dry air, and his mother knew he was going to be a healthy one.

His mother also knew, from that very moment he first howled his life to the world, that something was wrong with her baby boy no matter how healthy he seemed to be.

She was right, in that way mothers can sometimes be, and Tom grew to be a strong child that, while happy enough as well as friendly with the other children, never seemed quite as happy as he might have been. By the time he was six years old even his father, one of those who is usually slow to accept that things he cannot measure or count might indeed still exist, began to notice that the boy always seemed to shy in the midst of his biggest smiles and pause during the brightest laughs.

Unlike Tom's mother, though, Father was not one for patient encouragement and slow loving "growth" in hopes things might get better. On the boy's eighth birthday he sat his son down and asked him what was wrong.

"What do you mean Dad?" Tom asked, smiling lightly and breathing heavily from running around with the other children. His father explained that the two of them, Mother and himself, had been noticing how odd he tended to act at what should be the happiest times of his life.

"Well," Tom replied, his face growing pensive as he seriously considered the question in that way eight-year-olds have, "It's like I get so happy, and then remember something...something I want or would make things even better!"

"But I can't ever remember what it is I remembered," he said, nodding and looking expectantly at his father, perhaps with the certainty Father would know what to do.

"Ah, alright Tom," Father replied, ruffling his hair with a smile, "How about you just try not to let that bother you, alright? Now go play." And he smiled at his son, who ran off to play even though he wasn't quite convinced of his father's words.

Things went normally from there as these things do in even the most amazing of stories, and Tom grew up into a young adult. He gallivanted through his first year as a "teen," losing some of his old playmates to moves and changes and his sometimes introspective nature. He found he liked to read and think more than most kids he knew, but those few that stuck with him became his best and inseparable friends.

Then, on the night of his fourteenth birthday, Tom Elsire went deaf quite suddenly and with no explanation. Mother noticed first; it struck her when she had trouble waking him the next morning. Then, after great confusion, Tom himself and Father both became aware of just what had happened. He was rushed to the hospital where the doctors poked, tested, Hemmed, and Hawed as they sometimes do...and in the end they could find nothing wrong with his ears, brain, or any other sensitive little nerve.

So shocked, upset, and depressed by this whole affair was Tom that he didn't realize until three days later that he could hear himself speaking. The doctors, of course, determined that this was impossible and that he was merely hearing the words he was saying as "thought" in his head. A sort of memory of hearing, echoing in the smaller corridors of his mind. They were the experts, he knew, and both Mother and Father seemed to agree with them, so eventually he allowed even himself to be convinced of the fact.

And time passed. Tom adjusted to the daily differences of being deaf, the problems of having a dimension taken from one�s perspective on the world, slowly but surely. With headstrong resolve he fought to grow used to his new condition as best he could, even though this drove him further into his world of self examination and determination; old friends stayed or went, while new ones stuck or slipped to the wayside. He went on a few dates that never quite went anywhere, and had his heart broken a time or two as every boy his age is prone to do.

He went off to college, joined a writers workshop, read the great authors, studied math�and still, without fail, at every one of his most pleasant or joyous moments there would come the nagging feeling that something was forgotten or worse only ever partially known at all. Never could he fully escape it. Then quite suddenly, to his mind, he graduated with a degree in English and went off to edit the great books of the dawning century.

Of course he knew he�d have to edit some of the most mediocre or underrated first, but he didn�t let that slow him down all that much. Into his work and small circle of friends he threw himself with all the passion he could muster, trying with all his might to distract himself from those moments of stillness and the odd sense of loss.

And it was all this that brought Tom Elsire to the coffee shop on the corner of 7th and Colonial, in the year 2001, at 5:46, near the end of June. It was there, at that time, sitting among friends and chatting as best he could while reading the lips of people on too much caffeine, that he heard the most beautiful voice that had ever graced his ears.

He sat up so fast his two closest companions were immediately covered in their beverages, yelping at the heat and showing surprised scowls as Tom ignored them and leapt to his feet. His head jerked this way and that, ears out of the practice of perking but trying their best, and yet still he could not find the source of the song that brushed like a warm touch over his heart. The voice sang in lilting tones of a love simple and happy, likely some tune he had missed in his years of forced silence or perhaps older but one he had never heard; all he could think at the moment was that it might have been singing a nursery rhyme and sounded as sweet.

There! Out of the corner of his eye he saw her, a girl his own age passing by the window, and leapt from his worried friends clutching hands towards the door. As such things happen there was a press of bodies in his way, but with all the world still silent the voice never once grew more faint or difficult to hear. Pushing, apologizing, squeezing, and pressing he eventually made it to the sidewalk and looked about only to see the girl had gone even though the song still hung in the air. How was this possible? Was it a hallucination? Perhaps it was like the phantom of some old song that he had heard once before much, like the way his own voice still seemed to sound in his ears when he spoke? But no, because there it came more strongly from up the street, and all such thoughts of doubt fled his mind.

He ran, panting, down the street in search of the voice�s owner, able to hear the song grow more clear as he grew more near, till finally he was coming up behind the girl he had spotted out the window of the coffee shop. Reaching out he touched her shoulder, some half-formed excuse or ridiculous question on his lips, when she turned to face him and the song stopped. Her friends, unimportant if not unnoticed, frowned warningly at him as her beautifully startled face grabbed by the heart and tugged.

The words died on the breath that would have spake them, and he instead took his hand back and looked nervously at the ground. He apologized, not able to hear the girl�s friends and not paying enough attention to know anything but that they were perturbed; the girl herself watched him in a wary but not, he noticed, unfriendly manner as he went on.

He muttered something about her voice, and her friends yelled more even as she herself looked surprised a moment and then frowned. They called him an ass, a jerk, and a moron. He saw that they were looking violent now and stepped back further as they went angrily on.

She was mute, they said, had been for years, and if he again strayed within one hundred feet of her they would do things to him best left unsaid. She signed them to calm, and he merely stood there shocked. She signed that they should go, and his mind raced to catch up. She and her friends turned to leave, and his mouth opened of its own accord.

Tom Elsire had spent his life believing in the way things are, in a world that worked like it was supposed to even if exactly how it worked on him hadn�t yet been explained. He had gone through his life with something always missing and yet no way he could ever find to patch it. He had gone through his life sometimes playing the outcast but never playing the fool.

Tom decided right there, with the missing part of his life walking away thinking him an ass, the world as he had known it to be now telling him he had snapped, and with no concern whatsoever with how foolish he may look. He decided exactly what would come next.

He did the only thing he could and sang back the last few lines he�d heard her say�

�I hope you don�t mind, I hope you don�t mind, that I put down in the words�how wonderful life is,� he began with loud feeling, ignoring her two friends turning on angry heels with fists clinched, and his heart almost burst with joy as she turned with a surprised and curiously gleeful look herself.

��now you�re in the world�� they finished, both confused but smiling. In world full of crazy people acting sane, they each seemed to think, maybe it�s not so bad to be a little crazy every so often�and something passed between them then that they�d spend many an hour talking about in absolute silence long after the moment was memory.

Then Tom caught a fist to the jaw and just managed to miss a kick to the shin, her friends not quite on the same wavelength. She tried to suppress a laugh as she pulled them back and helped him to his feet, offering her hand and speaking her name.

�Hello Alice,� Tom said with a wince as he smiled, �I�m Tom.�

And then he asked if they could go somewhere to talk where he might get some ice for his face, and she agreed. Because even Happy Endings can sting a little if you don�t roll with the left hook.