Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Chapter 2 Summary

How It All Goes Down

We must have a different narrator here, as this chapter is set in '63 (1963, we're assuming) and it's a letter starting with "To my unborn child."
The narrator tells us about how he lost his speech, word by word, starting with the word "Anna."
The last word he could say aloud was "I."
To communicate, he had the words YES and NO tattooed on his palms. YES on the left, NO on the right.
He carried a notebook around to write in if he needed to say more than YES or NO.
By the end of the day, he'd usually run out of pages and have to flip back and recycle phrases from earlier in the day.
He'd save the notebooks all over his apartment.
Then, whoever's writing this letter tells us about "when I met your mother" (2.1). (Ted? Is that you?)
She sits next to him at a bakery and talks about loss, canned tuna, and the weather.
When she wonders why our narrator doesn't talk, he writes "I don't speak. I'm sorry" (2.1).
She writes in his notebook "Please marry me" (2.1).
He tries to protest, but she persists.
He wonders about how he lost the love of his life, how he's hopeless and helpless, and he flips to a page in his notebook and puts her finger there: it says "Help."