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Novelo Rectangle

When I woke up, there were seventeen voicemails from a stranger. A face is memorable, but once it's gone you can't help but misplace their significant details, their small freckles, the way they carried themselves. Their voice.Each individual moment was sealed neatly into seventeen small recordings, all of which felt shadowed in the unknowingness of whose voice waited on the other end, how could someone I don't know have left me seventeen messages? If I could have made it on time, I would have called back before the last message had been sent. At least then, I would've known for sure.When I opened the messages, it felt as if a ten-ton weight had dropped on me. It was as if a layer of thick honey had begun engulfing my airways.. sticky, clinging to my body it resembled your whole body being dipped in the amber. My mouth, my nose, and my lungs stung with an overflowing feeling until even the act of breathing felt impossible. Each message was filled with different tones, differing weight, and yet you could tell that it all meant the same in the end, the inevitability of being left behind, even if I had already gotten through this once before, how could this pain have been worse.The first message felt sweeter than the taste of your breath, the warmth felt like the memories of our nights in the summer air, it eased into my mind, the way our laughter once filled the emptiness while we ran across the evening moors, how it filled my chest. The second, softly spoken, like a comforting mother, gently rocking her child to sleep with a quiet lullaby, the way your voice felt like i could lay back, falling asleep in her arms as she swayed back and forth. The third, fourth, fifth, all melancholic, or bitter, vividly mirroring the moments I try to remember from the times that I know we had. Its as if i can see you, but through a multitude of layered silk, it obscures the little imagination that I have left, all I have to try and envision you again. The rest were almost completely silent. A silence worse than I thought possible. It surrounded me, collapsing my body to the ground like hands pressing my ribs down and closing in on my lungs, yet it felt like I'd floated off of the face of our earth. The feeling of being alone and afraid in the depths of the dark was clear, the distant buzzing and hums of the room no longer there. But even in space I could at least hear myself think.I listened to the silent messages repeatedly, hearing each pause and crackle in the speaker from the other end, as if it could still pick up your faint movements, as if you were coming back to keep talking. I think of the time that you had spent to send them, the thoughtfulness to think of someone such as me, someone unknown to you now. I could feel the emptiness creep in when those messages were over, that dull ache hung in the room, the ceiling seemed like it was coming closer until I felt like a single touch would send it down, crushing me. I stayed in that lull for what felt like days, but it only lasted seventeen messages. Each passing moment, each recording was a new story left to trail into another, it felt like I had fallen into one of our old storybooks and the adventures we had to face, our nights we stranded ourselves in a tent, scrambling in laughter at the idea of something outside, your valor as my knight, and I, your prince, but this time I was alone. The way you can almost hear a soft breath in the air, as if someone is still there was the worst. I wish I could keep you waiting for me to finish my own words before you spoke up again, maybe then I could have convinced you. Each message left the same feeling as those first few. If you whispered next to me along with your voicemail, right into my ear, this would be that same feeling, as if you had just told me another secret we couldn't tell anyone else.Seventeen different messages, seventeen drawn out moments left for someone to listen to, whether it mean something or nothing at all, you can pull any meaning that you wish from the words, yet you can't force it to be that way, the dreams you have for those messages, the hope that good news comes from the other side, and the fears that surround us, each as its own, uncontrollable force.When I listen to those messages, I hear the apprehension in your voice, the hesitation. The guilt, oh, how cruel it can be. The cruelty of becoming strangers, I don't know you anymore, and each moment gives way to show that depressing truth, how I spent time unraveling the words, the deeper I went, the more I felt I knew. I can admit i am consumed by it. I am stained by my own hunger and viciousness to find the truth, I can't help myself but read into your words, even if i know they were meant in simplicity. I left those messages on my bedside table, I couldn't bear to listen anymore, to hear your guilt wrap around my own. As if a snake shedding its own skin needs it back, as if that weight wouldnt hold it down from being its better self. Hearing that softness, that bitter calmness of finality was like watching you close the pages of your favourite story. Instead, im left with those seventeen fragments, the silence and the pauses, the hesitation stitched between your words, and yet your valor, your bravery shone through. And now, all I can do is replay them, over and over, from the person I once knew, the person who I named mine, who now only exists as a stranger.

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Dozy

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