My Voice
My voice is here, somewhere.
I can hear it. I don’t hear it with sound, though, I don’t hear it with words. I hear it through vibrations in my chest, I hear it with the sense of touch, with bright flares in different areas of my brain, with warm pressures in my heart, with a deep ache for a shapeless blob to be trimmed and neatly fit into a container, so that I can grab it and swing it around and point to it and show it to you. I want to show it to you. Desperately so.
I can’t find it, though.
I wish I could. I wish you could hear it. I wish you could see what I see. I wish you could feel what I feel. I wish you could ache how I ache. I wish you could know what it’s like to be me, in all its colors and its numbness and its awe and its pain.
I wish you could breathe it in and hold it there for a second. Just a second more. I wish you could feel how it fills your lungs, how it pushes your ribcage out, how the fabric of what is you expands when you let it in.
None of it’s real. None of it happens. You don’t feel any of it. You can’t breathe it in. You can’t feel it. You can’t hear it. Not if I don’t speak it.
If only I could find my voice, I would sing with wordless melodies, an infinite song of countless movements to catch in air vibrations the entire universe, the one I see, and the ones I imagine too. I wish you could see its colors. I wish you could smell its scents. I wish you could hear it hum like it hums in my chest.
I wish I could wish for less, and just speak. I wish I could search, and I wish I could find.
I wish I could find my voice. With it, I would tell you a story — just one — and it would change your life, just like it’s changed mine.
