OUR BECOMING, pt. 1

Presence Sounds Like Love

 

It would begin with a sound.

If it is to be, it would begin in sound. For sound is the nearest relative of presence, presence to that which exists, and all of it full and invisible.

She spoke.

She mouthed, and her voice made no sound.

But he heard. And he helped, only from much too far away. So far removed it couldn’t register. As empty as can be, sound still requires space, think “silence.”

They were silent and distant, but echoes arrived in his ears on the winds and through wires, his sister, his landscape, his past and the rains.

Might he hear who he’d seen long before, across so many miles? The machines, said his sibling, those designs against timing and space, they can do it, can take sound beyond its own body, beyond its own place, they unravel and ravel again, their logic like that of play, she said.

He tried. He failed. He pressed stop.

She replied.

Her lips moved but produced not a sound. Just an echo, he heard and translated, attached to the waves flowing back to her, so familiar, familiar enough to engage, engaging in her recognition, what seemed a reflection of her.

He flowed in and she spoke and they swam through the wires in their sleep.

And he wrote. In cursive, presenting the shape of the waves while charting their flow, susurration, their absence, the words were transported as whispers.

And she sensed, as did he, empty sounds full of each, making music. Larynxing tones of the sea.