Shhhh.

I have a voice, but for some reason, it’s being very quiet at the moment. I think it’s exploring other options. Today I thought it might be interested in doing something, but it just spent ten minutes on my bed beside an open window, batting at snowflakes as they fell. Soft flecks of ice were swarming, condensing and tumbling together, clinging, quivering in the air like a profusion of bees in some apocalyptic vision. Against the backlit cloud cover they were black ashes, bleaching white, exhausted by the unseen flames as they fell down below the tree line. Any snowflake large enough for me to follow in the milieu I swatted with a frozen palm, licking snowmelt from between my fingers – really just spreading the moisture around and then feeling the bitter, peppermint breath of February as it yawned and stretched and rolled out of bed.

My voice has gone to sleep because I sat on it, like when you sit on your foot and it goes all stingy. You then get up and limp a pace or two, perhaps stubbing a toe on the edge of someone else’s desk, managing to injure yourself as well as disrupting their work, spilling their coffee. This assumes, of course, that wherever it is that you were sitting, on your foot, was also someplace that others were sitting, and working, and I suppose at least one desk was compulsory for the scenario, when in fact, you might be saying, I only curl up when I’m at home, and am therefore more likely to have split my shin on the corner of the pantry that has always been too big for the kitchen hallway.

Accident imagery is a peculiar slight of hand my voice resorts to when it wishes to give poetic detail to an otherwise intellectual or romantic situation. It works in both cases, adding a much-needed humanizing element; cooling the savory with a flash of sweet, cutting the syrupy with a pinch of salt. It is literary shtick I’ve affected to make my writing seem more “real”. It also comes from a deeply abiding clumsiness, and a propensity for stubbing my toes on the edges of desks and splitting my shins on the corners of kitchen pantries. Right? ‘What you know…’ as the saying goes.

If my voice were a girl, she would be in prison serving 20 to life on murder one. (The defense would like to call the mind – She’s only theatrically homicidal – the heart – It was a crime of passion! – the liver – She was probably drunk… We would have liked to call the eyes, but they were too tired. Just the thought of it and the defense had to rest.) But my voice is not a girl, it’s just a voice, and the system doesn’t process aberration, so instead it’s wasting away behind spacebars, peering out with sharp, bright eyes between the commas, gnashing razor teeth at the establishment with awkward spacing and excessive punctuation.

Be careful if you cough, and cover your mouth, because my voice might choose just that moment to sally forth, and you would miss it because of your selfish and egoistic illness. Fuck your flu.
It’s a silly little thing sometimes, my voice, insisting on diction that makes very little sense but sounds trippingly from the tongue when read aloud. It’s stubborn. It stays stuck like tea stains on a porcelain cup to concepts and phrases which sink the whole ship for love of a quip that likely means nothing at all in the end. It also hoards atrociously, taping on syllables and building whole extra rooms to make room for some thought or clever phrase. It never seems to throw anything away. In fact I would call it, on the whole, slovenly, untidy even; indolent. I’ve been thinking for years about downsizing, you know, moving into something minimal, something modern. Something… eco-friendly. We’re very interested here in sustainability.

Which perhaps is why my voice is hiding. Perhaps if I make some show of support – read some Wilde, a little Emerson on the side…

I have a voice, but right now, it’s hiding. Right now, at this very moment, it is engaged with strawberry ice cream. It’s taken with a niggling crawl that comes from my sinuses and has moved into my teeth, making my face itch like the devil. I cannot seem to pull it away from a sincere contemplation of the teapot as reflected in the varnish of my desk… It’s wondering if you’ve ever eaten wild boar…. What do I do with that? No really, what do I do?