I Got My Voice Back

After the brand, things got quieter, and quiet in that place meant safer, because the dangerous time was the breaking, and the breaking was done. They moved me less roughly. They were not kind, there was no kindness in it, but you do not knock the dents back out of a thing once it is shaped, you only move it to where it sells. In that lull, something in me began, very slowly, to heal. The first thing to come back was my voice.

I remember the day I noticed. I said some small nothing out loud, and the sound came out whole, a real voice, not the whisper I had been living inside for months. And I thought, with a small private gladness I had not felt in so long I barely knew its name, there it is. I got my voice back. At least some things heal. I let myself think it. At least some things heal, and other things are never returned, and I meant the months, the road, the man, the girl I had been before all of it. I was taking the inventory of my losses and counting my voice in the column of things given back. I did not know what was in the other column. I want you to sit with that, because I cannot, not for long. I sat there grateful for my voice, doing my arithmetic of grief, and I had the columns wrong. The thing that was never coming back was not the girl I used to be. I just did not have the word for it yet. I would be given the word in a grave.

My body was changing in that lull, and I read it the way I read everything by then, wrong, because no one had given me the right way to read it. I was a little less starved-looking in one place, and I told myself the food had gotten slightly better, which it had. I was tired in a way sleep did not fix, and I told myself the road had worn me down, which it had. Everything happening to me had a reason standing ready to take the blame, and a girl alone with no one to tell her otherwise will hand the truth to the nearest lie every time, because the lie is bearable and the truth, the truth I could not even have imagined, was not. The women still gave me that look sometimes. I still did not ask. By then not asking was the deepest thing I knew how to do.

And my faith, in that lull, did a thing I would not understand until much later. It stopped being a fist. A fist is for holding on in a storm, and the worst of the storm had passed, and so the hand, very slowly, in the dark, opened, and what was in it had not gone out. It had gone quiet instead of desperate. A small steady thing now, like a candle behind a cupped hand in a wind, not flaring, not begging, only lit, only there. That was the start of the part of me people would later lean on without knowing why, the quiet at my center that other broken people could rest against. It was born in that lull, after the brand, when the screaming was over and the voice had healed and I sat in the awful stillness of being finished and found, to my surprise, that I was still in there, and that the small light had not blown out, and that I could be quiet now without being empty. I thought I had survived the worst of it. I had. There was just one more thing coming that was not about surviving, that no amount of faith was going to make survivable, and it was already, by then, on its way. I was carrying it toward the border, and I did not know I was carrying anything at all.