Voices

They don't leave all at once.

First, you forget the rhythm. The way they'd stretch a word. Or pause, just before a joke.

Then the tone slips. The timber unspools until what's left isn't a voice at all. Just the shape of one. Like a shadow at sunset, bending and stretching, losing its edges until... it's nothing but a vague outline of someone you used to know.

It started young.

After breakups, after distance, you'd go to recall a voice and realize it was already gone, slipped between the couch cushions of your memory while you were busy moving on.

But now, now it's not just old flames or forgotten classmates.

Now it's people who lived inside your everyday. People you loved. People who made you.

Friends you haven't seen in decades. Grandparents whose hands you can still picture, but whose voices drift just out of reach.

And your parents.

You try. You really, really try.

You close your eyes and dig through time, but their voices are smudged and slippery, like trying to cup water in your hands.

And the worst part?

You didn't even realize you were forgetting.

You never thought to record the way your mother laughed when she wasn't thinking about being heard. Or how your father sounded when he said your name in the hallway, just to check in on you.

And now there's nothing.

No voicemails, no cassette tapes, just you, sitting in the stillness, trying to mimic voices you'll never hear again.

Our childhoods existed before everything was filmed and archived and tagged.

Now it's all shadows.

No rewind. Just outlines.

A voice is more than a sound. It's presence. It's proof. It's how someone filled a room without ever having to enter it.

So if you still can, record them.

Even if they're sitting across the table right now.

Record the way they talk about nothing. Their stories, their bad jokes, their sighs.

Because one day, you'll reach back for that voice.

And it won't come.

And that silence will feel like the end of the world.

This has been a love letter to a forgotten thing, and to the voices that once tethered us, now lost—now priceless.