My lost voice

 My lost voice. It left a small cave of ribs at dawn, a hollow that smelled of rain. I searched under pillows, between punctuation marks, inside the pockets of my old jacket where I keep winters. I offered paper boats folded from the thin maps of my throat, each with apology. At the market the fishmonger hummed; his song filled the alleys. A child chased a kite that knotted itself in the wind and laughed. I listened to the echo of other people's breaths, like a bell, trading the syllables I owed the world for pocket change and hope.

My lost voice learned to be careful — it hid behind curtains, it practiced silence like a monk counting steps, slow and steady. Sometimes it peered out through a cracked window and mouthed the weather, watching sparrows argue about direction like small, winged philosophers. Once, I heard a radio speak its name without shame, a word folding into my chest and making fire. I slid toward that warmth, fingers soft as evening, but the word slipped back, across the tiles and into the city’s seam, joining the ordinary hum.

I began to write letters to the place where sounds go, scrawled my vowels on the skin of envelopes and sent them by mail. Postmen returned them stamped with morning and the blue of skies. Still the street kept a secret where my voice had gone to sleep, wrapped in a shawl of exhaust and streetlight. So I learned new ways to be loud: I planted my silence like a flag, let it wave over the ruins of sentences I couldn’t finish. And when night loosened its knots, I found the voice waiting — not lost, changed — quieter instrument, tuned to the weather of my hands and the hush of listening.