My Voice, by Cindy Caban
My evil voice sings to you at night; ravaging the beast inside you, awakening your soul, and making you scream and shrill in your bedsheets. Yet when the sun begins to bloom, it becomes tied with innocence, sacred to the bone. Its lovely harmony makes you smile and you follow its melody day after day, wondering if it’s real. And as you try to figure it out, my voice begins to shut down as I’m afraid that the dungeons in my world are trying to escape. It slithers across your shoulder making your heart beat faster. Everyone else is afraid, but you ask for more. You look deeper within the black caves and dust. You become wrapped inside my throat and your bacteria starts to engulf me, weaken me. My voice fights back; it lunges you across the walls, spits blood on the surface of your eyes. You begin to reach closer, past my voice and into my mind, where every enclosed thought is written.
There are no barriers to protect myself any longer. You have reached what I’ve tried so long to keep from the world. You try to understand, try to decode the message that I breathe into my lungs each second but you fail, like everyone else you fail. I am the hidden language beneath your tongue. Read me in Braille, you won’t see. Read me in Morse code, you won’t see. I am the water that tempts you to jump in, fleeing from reality. As you try to become a part of me, and remain a memory, your desire is filtered back out into the world like a baby with no place to go. My memories try to build up, but they remain stiff, stuck in a times stance. The past is what contains me, sealed in a jar. My memories transcend themselves back and forth, not letting new ones blossom.
And even if I can’t have them all I’d rather have the ones I began with, to replay the moments that make me not want to escape but relive them. If they were all gone, I’d be nothing, because who are we without our memories but a lost voice looking for an identity?
