How do you talk when there is no sound?

Communicating with a deaf person face to face is a lot harder than you image. Mouth reading skills can't keep up with the usual pace of a hearing persons speech (so you'll constantly remember to talk slow and in simple words), and sign language is quite abstract for the uninitiated.

Amazingly, the hardship of communicating makes the act of getting even simple meanings across a hugely rewarding and fun exercise. Yes, you have to resort to pen and paper a lot. And the amount of actual information exchanged is limited. But the decreased bandwidth is a welcome challenge.

You must prioritize what you say. There's no safe heaven in running idle, saying strings of nothing. The time it takes to write just two lines by hand on a piece of paper significantly ups the ante on making the wait worth while.

And I just had to keep up for thirty minutes. Yet, however challenging, I enjoyed it immensely. So, La Mettique (yes, that deaf girl), rendezvous some time?