Issue 4: Echoes

I never heard the sound of her voice. We were silent for ten days—thirteen women at a meditation retreat on the Sunshine coast. We exchanged thin-lipped smiles in the bathroom, towels ferned through wet hair, faces muggy with restoration. I took these smiles as private accolades that I was fitting in. I wanted so badly to be good.

I saw her for the first time on the second morning. I opened my eyes during group meditation and saw her across from me in the circle. She looked back, two fugitives in the quiet. The nametag pinned to her chest was written in cursive so coiled I mistook it for the word delusion. Later I realized it said Delani.

Her image stayed with me for the rest of the hour even after I closed my eyes. The ridges of her cheekbones honeycombed with acne scars. Her eyelids blazed with red eyeshadow like a bleeding animal.

Two hours later, we were asked to return to our bodies, open our eyes, alchemize back into ourselves, but my body rejected its return. I craved mental silence. I wanted my brain to rot like abandoned fruit, soft with mold. The order of it—the ruin.

***

The day I moved out of my parents’ house in Richmond, I bought a betta fish named Wolf. He seemed nervous, clipping tight circles in his bowl, ducking behind decorative rockweed. He hid when we made eye contact, or so I convinced myself.

I worked at a textbook store part-time while finishing film school. Every night, I listened to the city. People shouted in the alleyway behind my apartment, tires growled in wet snow, pedestrian lights beeped like heart monitors—the pulse of the city carried in four-way intersections. I had never felt more alone.

***

We were allowed a half hour of free time every afternoon. Women stretched on the veranda, bodies elastic. They practiced Vinyāsa and swirled lemon mint tea. They wrote in leather bound journals they had bought for the occasion and described their transformations in whispery prose. I looked over their shoulders at their tiny cursive sentences and thought, even in writing, they were quiet.

During our half hour of free time, I followed Delani into the garden.  Snapdragons and bunny tail grass veered like magnets to her skin. She whipped around as if to ask: Are you following me?

I plucked the head of a dandelion and blew the seeds in her direction. She stuck her tongue out to catch them. 
It was remarkable, then, how beautiful she was. In the quiet, I could almost hear our lungs expand, exhales carbonate the air, thoughts shift into place.

***

At night, lying in a room with four mattresses on the floor and the snores of strange women around me, the ceiling flaking off in small pieces, I imagined the sound of her voice. I gave it inflections, dimples, layers. I imagined the way she might roll her vowels and soften the ends of her words.

I’ve noticed you, she might say to me.

I would respond: I’ve noticed you.

***

In the kitchen, she cleaved an orange from my hands. She showed me how to push the rind inside out with her thumbs. The pieces detached from each other and stood like white cliffs.

Back home they say I’m disturbed. I thought of telling her this, breaking our vow and using my voice for the first time in days. I imagined the look that might cross her face. The way she would exit the room, a halo against the back of my eyelids, an aftertaste of regret on my tongue. 

***

After I moved into the city, I found ways to fill the void of my one-bedroom apartment. I brought home men I didn’t know and didn’t trust. Their smell dampened my sheets. Their bodies were heavy.

When they had the courtesy of looking around before they fucked me, men would comment on Wolf. What’s his name? Is that a betta? I used to own a fish when I was a kid. I started to put him in the bottom of my closet when I knew I would have company. I didn’t like the way he made me seem interesting.

When dating apps dried out, I talked to strangers in video chat rooms until four in the morning. Men who wouldn’t show their faces asked me to do ugly things. I created different characters for myself like I was performing a six-hour self-tape. I didn’t know my lines until they came out of my mouth.

On the bus home from work, I listened to music in studio headphones with the volume on maximum level. The sound was so loud it hurt. I made a game of trying to disguise my pain in public. How long could I last?

It was around this time I realized I wasn't the kind of person who wanted normal things. I had destructive desires, my sister would later say. I liked the alliteration—the poetic rhythm. It felt neat and packaged. Two words could carry so much and so little at the same time. 

***

On the fifth night of the silent retreat, the noise got bad. I broke away from the group’s evening Sudoku and sat in the upstairs hallway, knees to my chest. Nobody had warned me about the cacophony of my own mind—a sound I couldn’t turn off.

Delani appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked at me, searching, mouth open like a deep-sea fish, captivating and strange and beautiful. She motioned towards the bathroom. I hesitated for three exhales, afraid that she would try to help me. On the fourth, I followed her.

She held a pair of scissors, fingers dimpled around the blade. I panicked, imagining blood and guts, my stomach emptying itself into her palm, but instead she pulped a strand of her hair through her fingers and snipped. I watched her reflection in the mirror as she cut her hair, precise and silent, to her collarbones. After several minutes, she became awkward, fumbling for hair she couldn’t reach. I touched her wrist, asking. She looked at me and nodded.

I cut her hair until I was done, then she took the scissors to mine. She didn’t ask for permission and she didn’t need to. I was realizing that language could exist in someone’s body. There was an alphabet coded in Delani’s blinks, syntax in her breathing. I wondered what would translate if she kissed me.

***

My sister found me in April, a week after my film classes had ended. I’d given her a spare key months before so she could crash when she was downtown late at night.

She appeared in my bedroom with smeared mascara. “Are you okay?”

I held Wolf in the palm of my hand.

“You haven’t picked up the phone in a week.” She noticed my fingers loose and uncurled around his body. “What happened? Is he dead?”

“I think he’s about to.”

“Put him back in the water! C’mon, what are you doing?” She was hysterical.

I watched his chest seize. His mouth puckered open and closed. His breaths were so quiet I couldn’t hear when the last one came.

She took Wolf from me and plunked him into the fishbowl. He ghosted to the bottom, already gone. She held me, then, her palm pressed against my back. “You’re going to be okay.”

She signed me up for the silent retreat after that. A friend of hers from university knew the woman who ran it. Definitely worth the price, they said. Five hundred dollars for your life back. Something like that.

***

On the tenth day of the silent retreat, there was an evening thunderstorm. I stood in the garden and listened to the sky’s heartbeat. In the morning, we would return to our separate lives, tarnished with sound, and it was perhaps this inevitability that brought me to the garden. I wanted the storm to take me in, make me slick with its power and purity, like the final note of a song.

Someone stepped onto the veranda and I knew without looking who it was.

When I turned around at last, the house lights swallowed Delani’s features like she hailed from a remote star. She looked glossy and far away. Mythological.

I never liked that sound and silence were the only options. I wanted to believe there was something in between the two. A third space if you knew how to feel for it—somewhere soundless but not unspoken.

I turned back to the sky, feet sticky against the garden tiles. Thunder crashed and the house rattled behind us, unsteady on its base. We stood in total silence as the entire world around us seemed to scream. And for the first time, my mind was quiet.