Missing: Her Voice
I am looking for my voice. Have you seen it?
Here is a police sketch of it. For starters, it sounds a bit like everything and also a bit like nothing else ever has. It sounds like a rose on the brink of death — the petals wither at first touch but as they fall, they tumble along with the wind like leaves in the autumn rain. It can be cold like the September song I was born into but also cozy like the warmth of an apartment marinating in a Bombay afternoon. When I write to ask you about my missing voice, I listen hard to myself — to hear myself above the thousand lines I’ve read, the dialogues in my head, and the paper characters I’ve dreamt into existence. I don’t have a musical ear so this feels like an insurmountable challenge. How do I sift through a symphony of words, each strummed by a hand that is not my own? Would I say this? Would I write that? Or perhaps would I say it in this way instead? These letters clamor at the edge of the screen awaiting admittance. Yet, I need to pick and choose, strike and sew — not all the alphabets rhyme together to spell you.
I then think of Grammar with the capital G — foreign and rude sitting in a sentence like that and yet this little rule I’ve broken; would it be considered avant-garde or petulant? I watch writers write, readers read, writers read and now — here I am — a reader writing. Is this an exercise in patience or in practice? Both, my little wisdom affirms.
I think about the evening when everything went dark. The evening that forced us all to open our windows and scavenge for candles. We were just tiny light impoverished households looking into each other’s faces for the first time. To wake up in the dark, stick our heads out and follow the neighbors doing the same, watch the streets slow down, and hear the voices grow. We talked because there was nothing else to do. She told me a story of bicycles and train inspectors. I wanted to tell her about the eyes of the moon. Around the little pockets of candle fire, they spoke for the first time. If you watched from across the city, you would have seen that the building flattened out like a rectangle with squares illuminated by orange dots. We were a living, breathing, moving blackout poetry .txt file.
I imagined the tiny photons from the sun crashing into earth’s atmosphere — the first blizzard of life, sinking into the depths of the soil, cruising to the molten core, all the while losing life; losing light. And I imagined the leaves catching these tiny souls, curling them up, pressing them into their veins, drawing from their strength, and then bursting towards the sky to launch them back. When the candle is knocked over and the rug catches fire, no one makes any motion to move. We watch the flames lick and grow. It dies every second it lives. The light darts across the room, the shadows escaping out into the night. Then the rug curls and snuffs itself out.
When we look outside, the billboards remain lit. There is enough for those who already have enough. The glare of the neon is reflected in the black of my eye.
There is a story here somewhere. You’ll read it soon enough. I find my goodbyes and my tears in another poem. All my feelings are shared — or are they borrowed? Will we ever know? I think about the evening when everything went dark because it was the first time I noticed that my voice was missing. By the way, have you seen it?
The police are unsure what to do with the sketch. So am I. I watch the rose petals fall on the brown earth. Unlike photons, they will lie there in their stillness catching the rain and the snow. In the many moments that come after, I will come to realize that it is an eternal petal. The soft red shine will never rust.
