Kyle Joshua A. Cadavez

Here, Where I Don't Stutter Published in: Philippine Daily Inquirer's Young Blood Section, Jan. 26, 2020 I was once told that I buffer like a Youtube video. Typically, the sentiment was coupled with impatient eyes, or foot tapping like merciless knocks on the floor. Tap! Tap! Tap!--they say--almost like cracking an egg open into boiling oil. Sometimes I just purse my lips and stop. But often times, I get tired by my own silence, too. I have a stutter. A mild to intense one. It’s a problem that erupts from my anxiety from giving orders to fastfood strangers to just chatting with friends. I stutter like a word interrupted by an urgent dash--a sudden pause--that occurs in each syllable. I s-stutter just l-like that. In Quezon Province where I grew up, crowds of coconuts are as ubiquitous as the faces that used to mock me for my speech. In my early years in school, kids in my class call me “utal” and ​“bulol” just so carelessly as it had been passed off as a joke. I never found it funny. I just finished college, and now my skin is as thick as coconut husks unbothered by irrelevant friction. Growing up tight-lipped with a noisy mind was never easy. In jeepney rides home, a simple ​“Para po” gets shackled back into my throat by the curling of my tongue, as my teeth battles for dominance to release the words from my quivering lips. So, I let my knuckles signal drivers to alight me. And when the stutter attacks, I get an extra mile from my supposed stop. Sometimes I still feel people staring deep into my back as I descend. I blush hard and hot like exhaust pipes. So, arm-in-arm with my mother, whom I call ​“Nanay”, I went to a speech therapist in a hospital closest to us. I could still recall each moment vividly in my head: the long, dim-lit corridors, the sickened double doors that close and open like mouths, a yellow light flickering softly like a morse code for help. Help, I thought silently. How eerily appropriate. The doctor’s office was ordinarily arranged with 3D models of the human body, which I thought were unnecessary. Across us she sat, introduced herself, and pulled out a perpetual calendar from her drawer. She pointed to a sentence so small I could barely see it. And when I read it out loud successfully without stuttering, she smiled at me and my mother and gave her diagnosis: “​Hijo​, you don’t have a stutter. You just need friends.” Spoiler alert: friends don’t cure stutters. When ​Nanay and I went home, I remembered we weren’t friends when she messed my hair with that familiar grin and told me it’s okay. I decided that day that she was my favorite person, because I do not stutter when I say her name. Speaking of names, I cease being Kyle at Starbucks. But I cannot be 'Marco' at the barista (for I stutter with my letter M), nor Pablo, Timothy, or Bob. I cannot be anyone who's an M, T, P, S, B, K, and L. So instead of my own birth certificate-vested forename, I use "James" instead, and now it's the name written in thin marker on every grande latte cup I sip silently in the mornings. I remember this movie ​"100 tula para kay Stella", a cliché Filipino romance who starred a well-spoken JC Santos as 'Fidel', a timid high school wannabe poet with a stutter so intense he could only speak three words without stammering. That's me, I thought. That IS me. I almost teared up with the representation until I was swallowed by soft laughters and suppressed giggles from all sides of the cinema. They weren't laughing at what Fidel said, this is no comedy, they were laughing at how he spoke. And I also almost laughed, I swear, at how surreal and oblivious the audience was. I sulked like a child in the darkness. 'Please stop laughing'--that's only three words long. Just three words. But I laughed along instead, but unlike everyone else, I never found anything funny. What I cannot do in speech, I translated in writing. At first it was essays, which I enjoyed and pulsed so passionately about. I’ve always been the ​“pambato” in essay competitions in high school up until college. I loved the deed. I loved the victory. Then I drew comics, where I release all the unsaid punchlines in common conversations, all the jokes that I set aside from the fear that I would not give justice to its delivery. In written words, I was funny, important, and unashamed. Then I became a journalist. Campus journalism was something else. It is an entire new world, new people, new typography. It’s a field just like a teenager’s bedroom where the clothes and posters were intimately familiar yet also so foreign. If I had to make a point, I knew I had to speak. It’s become my greatest fear at that point: speaking. Public speaking. Reporting. Interviewing. Eulogies. Talking. Words feel warm in my hands, but painful in my mouth. It’s like the same distasteful joke ​“Bulol ka”,​ grinding into the muscles on the inside of my cheeks. I d-don’t like it. So instead, I write. I let my fingers talk--Tap! Tap! Tap!--on the keyboard, where my thoughts are unencumbered by the sudden jerks of my tongue, unbridled and irrepressible across the screen that is my audience. I take my pen and I speak, words printed on paper like paint, as the ink forms what my mouth cannot. This is how I talk comfortably, unafraid finally. This, for me, is my only safe haven in which I won't be judged, pitied, and laughed at. Writing will always be the best medium in which I can express myself. It is the only thing that smoothly flows in me--from my brain down to my pen's ink. In writing, I do not stutter. So, I wrote this, almost like a validation, but also for inspiration. To all the other ​bulols in the world whose voices pause at the most inexplicable of reasons, but most understandable ones. To my s-s-stuttering friends: life goes on even when uttered in various pauses. Life is meant to be lived one word at a time, anyway.