The First Time I Heard My Voice

It was just the other day. There is a distinction between the voice one hears in his or her own skull and the one others hear as you speak. It’s like listening to a recording of yourself talking, or laughing. There is detachment there, suddenly, the rejection of your own voice upon hearing it. It’s foreign to your ears, but why? Why is it not the same: how the world listens to the sounds that emit from your mouth and the reverberations within flesh and bone?

Friday night permit me to one place only: the Archibald S. Alexander Library‘s front desk. At any given moment, my eyes were glued to the shining screen at several photographs of potential apartment spaces Kyle and I could share in Japan, or teaching programs where I could spend my time and effort helping very young children speak English, while I learned Japanese.

The future blossomed for me in an instant. I was filled with light and lightness. One could say it was pure, unadulterated hope. Potential laid out its path for he and I.

My shift ended at midnight. I was ecstatic: Kyle worked at the computer lab down the street, so I walked in my quickened pace towards the Student Center to meet him. We walked home together: I noticed the trees, blooming in the night to be blessed by sunlight in the morning–and being the only sober human beings wandering the streets.

It was the first time I heard my voice:
we were in his basement and I was bra-less in a big sweater and I told him about our future in Japan. Our futures felt like engorged fruits upon the fragile vine of time above us. My voice, as I spoke, materialized before me in the shape of his smile and I knew, at that moment, that I had heard myself for the very-first-time and I must have been consumed by it because what my voice told me was that finally, here stands the only other human being on this earth that has happened upon my path in life, who shares love, who grounds me at the same time allowing flight and freedom.

{ My voice,
I heard,
her speak,
sudden alignment. }

Kyle Mezzacappa, it’s been six months of exploring each other’s worlds. Everyday I look forward to traveling the length of your existence, to cherish, to love, to appreciate. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I KNEAD you!

alive, breathing

The color-blind boy stared at the brittle, fleshy remains of his left arm, crushed among the roadside. Ten minutes earlier, a fifty-something truck driver with a disgusting sense of humor pushed harder on the gas pedal. Whiskey-mouthed and balding. I don’t know what became of him, but in this story he got away, clean and guiltless. Dark, grey liquid coated the boy’s pale arms, his lanky legs. The sun had just set over Fort Dodge, Iowa. He forgot how to blink, the poor thing. If the boy could see colors, he would have seen a blood-orange sky. Did he smell his mother’s apple pie or seared skin? He counted to five in slow intervals  in his head the pain swelled up swarmed electrified his torn flesh ran up through his arm forced its way into the pain receptors of the brain; shrieks shook the thick, grey branches, or so he wanted to think. He wanted his pain to cause the grass beside him pain, the trees, the clouds above him. He wanted everything in his world to feel what he felt. His eyelids began to shut. The flowers in his mother’s garden still smiled at him as he was dying. Yes, the young boy understood that he was dying. How dare her flowers smile at my pain!  So, he cried silently and began to disappear;  forgetting compassion, forgetting bliss, forgetting time.