How to Say I Love You Out Loud

by Karole Cozzo

  The lights are dimmed, and the speeches begin. With every participant, I find myself slinking farther and farther down in my seat, berating myself for grasping at the silly belief that I belonged among them. It’s not that the content of their speeches is that phenomenal, but, man, are they polished. Their voices never quiver, they smile into the crowd, and they rarely glance down at their notes. They are confident and collected, quite possibly on their way to the debate team at Yale.

  I lose count, and suddenly my name is being called. I freeze in my seat and grasp the armrests, certain I can’t make myself stand.

  Then I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and picture his face. I remember the person I’m here for. I’m not here to win, I’m here to speak. I manage to unpeel my fingers and stand up on shaky legs.

  I make my way up the steps without tripping and stand behind the podium, adjusting the microphone. I stare into the distance, relieved that it’s impossible to make out individual faces in the crowd with the bright light in my eyes. If anyone is laughing or smirking, I’ll be blissfully unaware. I glance down at my notes, just once, and then I start talking.

  “Human beings’ capacity for and development of speech is a powerful, amazing, almost magical phenomenon. By twelve to eighteen months of age, most humans can easily name objects and people, and describe relationships among them. Most toddlers have learned basic social rituals and greetings. After eighteen months, what is referred to as a ‘word explosion’ erupts within the young child’s brain. A child can speak over one hundred words and understand nearly three times as many. In the next year of life, vocabulary triples. The young human brain not only understands and processes the world it’s living in, but uses language to comprehend experiences and relay reactions. By age four, speech is typically intelligible and a child’s bank of vocabulary words approaches one thousand. In most cases, speech seems to develop as naturally as breathing, without explicit instruction. In most cases, for most children, the power of speech is taken for granted.”

  I take a deep breath after spitting out the facts and statistics I committed to memory, apprehensive about moving on to the personal side of this topic.

  “When it comes to my fifteen-year-old brother, Phillip, who is autistic, the power of speech cannot be taken for granted.” I pause for effect, as some of my fellow competitors have done, and let the words sink in.

  “My brother didn’t speak his first word until he was almost four years old. By the time most of his peers could use nearly one thousand words, my brother had one. If my parents, an entire team of therapists, and some really exceptional teachers hadn’t persistently pushed him, sometimes even provoking frustration or anger, he might never have spoken. Phillip didn’t put two words together for another six months, and he wasn’t capable of speaking in full sentences until a year after that.”

  “Almost ten years later, speech still does not come easily to Phillip. Phillip is smart enough to know that he is expected to speak when spoken to. But it’s still incredibly tough for Phillip to understand, process, and formulate his own thoughts and feelings. So he compensates in other ways. You may get a SpongeBob SquarePants quote when you ask him how his day was, because Phillip has a bank of lines and quotes he’s memorized from others to let him off the hook when he is required to reply.”

  I take another breath, suddenly remember where I am, and feel momentarily panicked. When I exhale, it comes out shakily, and my throat feels like it’s constricting. I force myself to remember how panicked Phillip must’ve felt when that fire alarm went off, and his speech failed him in expressing what the experience felt like inside his brain. I clear my throat and make myself continue.

  “But like I said, my brother’s a smart boy, and I believe there are a lot of things he’d like people to understand about him, if only the demands of engaging in the world around him weren’t so extremely overwhelming. I’d like to take a few minutes tonight to share some of Phillip’s challenges, on his behalf.”

  I tighten my grasp on the outside edges of the podium, sincerely hoping I will do his experience justice, that I can come even remotely close to capturing it.

  “Most of us have a choice regarding the challenges we take on. I made the choice to stand up in front of all of you tonight, even though it’s something that does not come naturally to me, and my palms are so sweaty that they’re sliding right off this podium.” I manage a smile for the crowd. “But ultimately, I had some level of control—I could choose to show up and face this challenge, or I could choose to skip out and avoid it.

  “Largely, Phillip does not have this choice, because so many tiny aspects of life are painful to him. For most of us, a trip to the mall at this time of the year is unpleasant because of crowded parking lots and the length of the line at Starbucks. For Phillip, it’s downright hostile. His hearing is so acute it sounds like ten thousand people are talking around him at once rather than ten or twenty. Registers beep, babies scream, and the canned music is a persistent swarm of bees in his ears. He might try to block some of it out, but it’s hard, what with how the fluorescent lighting burns his eyes, preventing him from focusing, and everything and everybody passing in his peripheral vision moves too fast to be processed.

  “The assault on his senses comes from every angle. My brother probably knows that the man in front of us on the escalator didn’t shower that day and that the cashier smoked a cigarette on her drive to work. The seasoned ground beef in the vats at Taco Bell is nauseating, and he can detect it a corridor away. A janitor used a cleaning solution with ammonia to mop the night before, and it still burns Phillip’s nostrils.

  “Everything around him is moving and swirling and assaulting his brain, which can’t separate and process the input, and ends up in overload mode. The sounds give him a headache, the sights compel him to close his eyes, and the smells drive him to the brink of vomiting.” I stare into the faceless crowd. “Put yourself in his shoes and imagine how badly you’d want to escape. I’d imagine you’d do whatever it takes to get out of there.

  “One time I got a migraine when I was at the grocery store with my mother,” I relay to the crowd. “I started seeing spots, and my hands were shaking. I was scared I was going to throw up. I said, ‘Mom, I need to go home; I don’t feel well,’ and we left within minutes. Now imagine you are Phillip, who is similarly incapacitated from everyday experiences, but also lacks the words to express how he feels like he is trapped within a war zone.

  “What would you do?” I wonder aloud. “What would you do to let someone know? How would you communicate without the power of speech?”

  My questions hang in the open air for a moment before I continue.

  “Well, you might hit, for one. You might fall to the ground. You might scream. You might cry like a child thirteen years younger than your chronological age. Because without the power of speech, how do you let someone know you’re hurting?

  “Phillip does all these things, several times a week. And because they’re the only tools he has to communicate with, Phillip’s bizarre behaviors, rather than his thoughts, come to define him. I’ve heard my brother called weird. Crazy. Retarded. Psycho. Dangerous.” I smile wryly. “It’s sad that ‘weird’ is the least offensive on the list. But because Phillip can’t speak well, he is defined narrowly—he is defined by his autism.

  “I play field hockey,” I inform the crowd. “Specifically, I’m a midfielder. That’s one part of who I am, one thing I do. Like me, Phillip is more than just one thing. Phillip has a range of thoughts, feelings, talents, and preferences. He is a whiz at math and he outperformed me on the PSATs. His favorite color is green. He loves to swing. He’ll do almost anything to get you to share your pretzel sticks with him. His favorite movie is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Phillip has a sense of humor.” My throat tightens on the next line. “And when he shares it with you, he has a smile that will melt your heart. Like all of us, I believe Phillip just wants to be loved unconditionally, for who he is, because he can’t really change
that. Phillip’s autism is a part of who he is, and I don’t deny that it’s a big part. But it’s never going to be all that he is. He should be loved for all that he is.”

  Something I’ve failed at miserably so far, I realize. I’ve done worse than reduce Phillip to a robot; I’ve reduced him to a problem.

  Even though I know I have several minutes left on the clock, I find myself wishing the timekeeper would sound the warning bell. I wish I didn’t have to finish my speech, because I’m scared I’m not going to be able to. I’m scared my power of speech might fail me in my attempt to reveal what’s in my heart. But no bell sounds to rescue me, and I push on.

  “As Phillip’s older sister, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to share the things I’ve shared tonight with the rest of the world. With kids at school. With teachers who have training but still lack full understanding. With members of the community. With anyone who can’t even begin to understand what life is like for Phillip, that it’s a miracle of strength that he gets out of bed and faces the outside world each and every day. Before today, I’ve barely said a word.”

  I lift my chin. “I stand here tonight and tell you it is a shameful regret, because just recently I realized something. Phillip can’t speak up, and I have chosen not to. It is disrespectful to him that I squander my power of speech, that I have wasted opportunities to advocate for, protect, defend, and help my brother. Or even just to call him my brother.

  “There have always been plenty of reasons to keep quiet,” I admit. “Phillip can be embarrassing at times. Because I’ve seen how often people reduce Phillip to his disability, I worry about being reduced in the same way, as his sister and nothing else. I hate the idea of being seen as weird, crazy, or psycho by association. I kept my distance because it seemed easier at the time, but I’ve started to learn that might not be the case.” I find myself thinking of Erin . . . and Alex. “The distance has cost me and it has cost my brother.”

  I hang my head and stare at the wood grain of the podium platform, trying to will away the tears I worry about forming in front of my eyes. “There’s another reason why I think I’ve kept my distance from Phillip. Autism, his limited speech . . . they don’t just keep Phillip trapped inside another world, apart from us. Somehow, in a way I haven’t fully come to understand yet, his autism keeps us locked away from him, too. It’s hard to give my heart to my brother. It’s really hard to say the words I love you when you know you’ll likely never hear them back.”

  I picture my brother, the one who’s never said the words, the one who’s never given me a hug. I remember the baby picture from the hospital, the brother I’d longed for that never really came home. It’s pretty futile to fight the tears, and I stop trying. “Sometimes, that idea just hurts too much, and you end up keeping your distance for a whole other reason. You develop a terrible habit of doing so. The idea of saying ‘I love you’ starts to seem scary.”

  I feel two tears tumble gently onto my cheeks, but I don’t brush at them, hoping no one will notice. I give myself a long pause, making sure my voice is steady before attempting to finish.

  “Tonight, with both a microphone and a crowd in front of me, I am using my power of speech to say the words out loud. I love you, Phillip, and I’m proud of you. You are ten times stronger than I’ll ever be. You are not weird, crazy, retarded, or psycho. You are strong, brave, funny, and resilient. I would like to be as strong and brave as you are, and today is my first step.” My voice cracks, but I’m past the point of caring. “I love you, and tonight, for you, I take that feeling beyond the privacy of our home or the quiet confines of my heart. I’m going to work on loving you out loud. I’m going to work on living out loud.”

  My chin shakes, my eyes are brimming, and my voice is weak. But I finish my speech. “I have the power of speech. And in your honor, I refuse to take it for granted anymore.”

  I dash down the steps. I grab my purse from my seat and hurry out of the auditorium, leaving the silence of the crowd behind me.

  I never had any plans to stay for the results and I don’t really care to hear my score. A victory is not something I wished for in the first place.

  I just wish he could have been here to hear me say it. I wish he was capable of understanding not just my words, but the emotion behind them. I want Phillip to know, in my heart, he is more than an inconvenience or an embarrassment. He is my brother. And that idea isn’t scary anymore.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Tuesday night, I was too emotionally spent by the end of my speech to even think about how it was received. But, as someone who’s amassed all those ribbons, certificates, and awards my mother has stockpiled, I should’ve known my underlying high-achieving tendencies would reveal themselves. Curiosity gets the better of me, and the next morning before school, I log on to the contest’s Web site.

  The results are posted. I didn’t win first prize, or place as first or second runner-up. But I’m a bit flabbergasted to find that out of twenty-six participants, my name is among the three listed as honorable mentions.

  A photo of the winners accompanies the list. I recognize several of those boys in the prep school blazers wearing medals on striped ribbons around their necks. The honorable mention winners are among them, holding small winner’s cups.

  I wonder if my recognition was attributed to the content of my speech or my presentation of it, and I hope it’s a little bit of both. I feel the slightest twinge of regret that I didn’t make myself stay. On one hand, I accomplished what I set out to achieve—I proved myself to myself, even if I haven’t yet proved myself to the people I care about. On the other hand, it would’ve been sort of nice to have the moment captured on film. So I could remember that sometimes it pays off to speak up.

  Maybe the contest organizers will mail me my trophy or something. I’ll put it away but I’ll be able to look at it from time to time. And that will be the end of the oratory contest.

  Except, as it turns out, that’s not the end of it. Not at all.

  When I walk into independent study that afternoon, Mrs. Adamson asks to see me in the hallway. She grabs a small blue gift bag off her desk, and I follow her, trying to ignore the feel of Alex’s curious stare on my back.

  Once we’re alone, she smiles brightly and hands me the bag. “Congratulations, Jordyn!”

  I peek inside the bag. There sits my trophy.

  There’s a handwritten note alongside it.

  I really wish you had stayed to receive the recognition you deserved for such an important, heartfelt speech. I felt responsible for making sure you received this.

  It is signed “Judith Devereux, Professor of Social Psychology, Villanova University.”

  I remember one of the female judges, sitting at the end of the panel, in a wheelchair. My instincts tell me it was Judith.

  I beam a little bit inside, thrilled at this type of acknowledgment. From a professor! At a real university!

  “The secretary said someone dropped it off this morning,” Mrs. Adamson tells me. “She said the woman passes the school on her way into work. Since I was listed as your sponsoring teacher, it made its way to me. I was so excited to see your trophy in that bag. What an accomplishment.”

  I blush and mumble a thank-you, twisting the handles of the bag in my hands.

  Then Mrs. Adamson glances back toward the classroom. “That being said, it’s pretty obvious that you aren’t particularly comfortable sharing about this experience.” She points toward a recognition bulletin board on the wall where she has posted noteworthy student achievements. The newspaper article about Alex’s playground is among them. “I would love to give you the recognition you deserve, but . . .”

  She looks at me expectantly, awaiting an explanation.

  I look at the floor. “It was a really personal thing.”

  I hope she doesn’t press.

  Luckily, Mrs. Adamson has always been kind and understanding, and she lets the subject drop. But first she pulls a slim, square case from behind her back
. “She sent this, too.” I reach out and accept the DVD she offers me. “Just know I’d love to watch it someday if you ever change your mind.” She chuckles. “I’m proud of you, that’s for sure, even if I can’t fully see why.”

  I hastily shove the DVD into the bag with the trophy and Professor Devereux’s note. “I know it doesn’t make sense that such a public thing is actually so private and personal, but . . . it just is.”

  She puts a hand on my shoulder. “It’s your experience. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

  We return to the classroom without further discussion. Alex continues to stare as I shove the blue bag as quickly as humanly possible into my book bag.

  When I sit back up . . . he’s still looking at me.

  Alex hasn’t looked at me, not really, since he walked away from me at the playground over a week ago. But now he’s looking at me again and he looks sad. His face is constricted and his lips are parted, like he has something to say, sitting right there on the tip of his tongue.

  But this time around, it’s Alex who remains speechless. He gives me one last pained look before dropping his head and returning to his work.

  That night, I situate the trophy in my bottom desk drawer on top of the note. I plan to put the DVD in there, too.

  Funny thing, though, once the DVD’s in my possession. It sort of burns a proverbial hole in my pocket. I can’t bring myself to tuck it away with the other mementos from the night.

  Not that I want to watch it. God. I cringe at the very idea of seeing myself on our forty-two-inch flat-screen, especially toward the end of my speech, when my tears got the better of me.

  But I keep thinking of why my mom said she wanted to take Phillip to the Sparkle Ball, how she wanted the world to give Phillip even a sliver of the recognition it gave me. I feel like I have, in some small way, given him that public recognition. I’d trounced the idea of the Sparkle Ball, something I still feel guilty about. I turn the DVD case over and over in my hands. But maybe . . .