When I speak I hear a deep murmur. A long, slow wave of graveled, arctic ice water. My pitch rises, lulls, and sinks back downwards into my chest where it rumbles softly. The timbre is smooth and distant, and it steadies itself into my singer's breath. I take another gulp of chilled air and feel my diaphragm drop, my vocal folds vibrate, and a mountain of solidified liquid crack beneath the water. 

My voice booms outwards and is carried across the ocean, threatening and dark, bigger than my body, consuming the space above and below. Half thundercloud, half iceberg, it crashes onto the surface, echoing in fits of fury and disquietude. 

@RubyPond

There's a knot that has been tied at the base of my throat. A hollowed hole between my clavicles that has been filled with spite and rancor and revulsion. A taste that urges me to bite down hard when I speak to and spit at myself. 

Why are you so angry? 

This knot of mine is tied with steel and coils itself around my vocal chords, spiraling downwards, squeezing my esophagus, stifling my throat so that my eyes water and my cheeks burn and the boy who just said, “I’d like a taste of that” will never know that what I would like to taste is the absence of salt and copper, immobilization and metallic degradation.

Perhaps the better question is, why are you so afraid?

Every word hardens me, sets my jaw, and flares my nostrils, bringing me back to every moment of every day that I reflect on my image in the mirror, when I am forced to look at my growing mass. I press my clammy fingers into this knot at the base of my throat, I knead it over and over again, but it still prevents me from telling the forty-year-old man in the park that I’m not a bitch and I’m not useless, and I’ve spent the last seven years purging all of these branded words that sons and brothers and fathers and uncles and grandfathers have given me over and over again since before I was in my mother’s womb. For seventeen years I ate their syllables and their good intentions, chewed, and swallowed them again and again. I was fed beauty and niceness and passivity, fat and thin and eat this, good grades, good girl, and good. I masticated sexy and sex and first kiss, turn around, be quiet, and you’re mumbling, slut, crazy, and dumb bitch. I took every dismembered corporeality into my vocabulary and washed it down with the pornification of the female figure. And at last, when my stomach protested and churned and spoke for me, I retched until I cried and moaned until I retched. Until a timid representation of a woman remained. A woman who did not know how to speak, only how to layer her voice with alloyed anger and fear.  

I'm awaiting the chronic chime of midday to surge through my entire body with its tormenting vibrations and dutiful oscillations; a child's explosive laughter erupts from my cracked window and echoes in a newly encountered silence, bouncing like a pinball from all corners of a beckoning, clear sky. 

___

In those first seven seconds, I felt my bursting heart lift above the unearthed pine trees, settling on top of the bell tower.

And I know that if I'd just grabbed my jacket and ran down the stairs, I could've joined the boy in all his infinite wisdom. 

___