The Silence of Her Voice

This short text was written in response to a writing prompt that said “Write a love story where one of the characters has some disability”.

I have never heard her voice. I will never be allowed to learn to distinguish between those small, subtle differences in tone that tells whether she is happy or sad or disappointed or a thousand other varieties of what we call emotion.

What I do know, though, is that every morning her hair is tangled in the most lovable way, like the branches of a new sapling in spring. That her face lights up every time I touch it, even when I can still see and feel the teardrops that traced there only moments before. I know the rhythm of her warm body when we dance to songs only she can hear, as she smilingly guides me through them. I know the blue of her eyes that can see all the way through all my walls, and I know the heat of her lips.

I tell myself that I don’t need music, and I almost believe it. Until I see her smile as she absentmindedly mimes along to the radio, and it hits me that I will never hear her sing. The thought saddens me more than I want to admit. I want to share everything with her, and yet I can’t.

There are parts of her life that I will never be able to understand, that I will never be able to share. Sometimes I feel jealous of other people, I cannot help it. They share worlds with her where I cannot go.

But then I lie in my silence and think about loss, and she comes up behind me. And she traces patterns on my skin. Soft, rhythmic patterns with fingers and lips and breath, and I realize that this is music, this is song. It is her song, and i can feel it. I let myself be swept away by the perfection of it, let myself sing along. And that’s when I understand that ”silence” is just another word, and I have never had any use for words.

So I have never heard her voice. I will never be allowed to learn to distinguish between those small, subtle differences in tone that tells whether she is happy or sad. But I don’t need those because with her, there’s music in everything. And that’s all the music I will ever need.