finding my voice

Let’s talk about loneliness. Let’s talk about anything. Let’s talk about anything other than loneliness. Let’s strike up a conversation. No. Really, let’s strike up a conversation that will take us anywhere else but here. Does this need any clarification at all? Do I need to explain why we need to go anywhere else but here? There are lots of reasons why we need to go away. We need to leave. We need to leave everything we know behind. We need to venture out into the distant treeline. We need to talk through the woods and hear the snow crunch under our boots. We need to inhale deeply and feel the cold prickle our nose-hairs. We listen now. We listen to the noises surrounding us in this dim late afternoon light. We hear the crunch of the snow under out boots. We hear the dry flutter of feathers. We hear tiny bird claws on bark. We hear beaks. We hear beak on wood.

Of course there is a bird. Of course, it begins with this little bird, jetting from limb to limb in the snowy forest somewhere far away from here. This little bird looks frantically at us. It stares and we of course, we stare right back. It’s right in front of us. Its eyes are dry and red and black. Its plumage grey and black and blue. It knows. What does it know? Does it know about us? Does it wonder why we’ve come here? Does the bird think that we are good people? Does the bird know that we are not good people? Are we good people? Are we alive? Are we close?

We are far away now, wandering down a road through the woods in the half dark of late afternoon. We are deep in the blue, we are deep in the black. We exist somewhere in-between. We are not from here, but we are growing ever closer to our goal. We are not here, and we are not there. But we left where we were, and we are getting ever closer. We hear the crunch of the snow beneath our boots and the occasional snap of a branch or a twig buried underneath the snow. Underneath the branches and the twigs, underneath the thin wispy blanket of snow, there are many more things on which we tread. We walk further and hear noises. We don’t hear the scratch crackle of leaves anymore. The leaves are wet and cold and half-decomposed. The leaves now are not the same as the leaves on which we tread several months ago. Then, they were dry and orange. Sometimes yellow, sometimes red. We know this, we remember this. We know what leaves are, and we know what leaves look like. Do you remember what leaves look like when they lie on the ground in the cool autumn afternoon? Do you remember what they look like? Do you know what one leaf looks like on a tree? I see many leaves; I never see a single leaf.

Up a hill, farther away from where we are now, closer to where we are not. Down in the valley, across a small stream that twists and tangles and gurgles through our minds. Over a black stream, up another hill and all the while, we think about that black stream, about all that ends in the stream. Everything that ends in the stream begins somewhere else, and everything that begins in the stream ends. The stream continues it’s slow and gurgly stream speech. It tells of small things. It speaks of itself, a small stream that only becomes smaller as you follow it up the hill, towards it’s source. It only gets smaller if you take that road. And when we follow the stream down the hill, it becomes larger, it swells and shrinks and twists and is the home for a thousands small things, a million smaller lives bustling and eating and mating and of course dying. The stream becomes low and flat, and ends bustling and wide along the sandy bank, its low flat sand-tongue lapping up the water that has come from everywhere. That tongue laps and laps but always remains.

Or does it? We were there once and the tongue was certainly longer, wider and flatter. It has curled up now, swollen and grown round. It is preparing to speak, slowly receding and swelling and organizing the air around it, ready to send out a single syllable into the cold and wet air there where the stream and the river meet, across the river from the old factories and rusted-out railcars. Can you guess what it will say? Will we understand it? Will we be moved? Will it be topical? The tree pierces the tongue, like it always has. A single tree, stretching out diagonal and spidery into the misty air, reaching high over the rusty factory skeleton, skewing my perspective. The tree remains constant, growing slowly and steadily with roots deep in that sandy tongue and even further down in the river-rock, growing slowly but strongly on everything that has begun and ended in that river, in that stream that meet and become one next to the tongue, under the waxing and waning shade of the summer tree, of the winter tree.

How big will the tongue be next time? Will it continue to recede and rage upwards against the teeth of the world? Will it force back the air? Will it unleash it’s single plosive? Will we be there when it speaks? The tongue will release the air gathered behind it and the air will rush outwards, past the teeth and the lips and move out into the world, out into the cold and wet air. It will fly past the factory and the hills, rising ever and rising steadily. That single letter, that single message will overpower the gurgling of the stream and the rushing of the river and the scratching of the bird. The message will be heard but the message will not be repeated. Who will repeat it? Who will be able to pronounce it?