Whose voice moves through you? Whose voice sings from your belly, resonates in your throat, and whose voice sings you to sleep at night? Is it your own? Could you recognise your own voice, if it happened upon you as a whisper in your ear? Have you listened? Can you listen? Do you know what it sounds like?
Whose voice lulls you into lies in the daylight bright and glaring, who’s voice calls you away from the truth of dreaming and buries your heart in the fear of believing, the fear of deceiving, the fear of revealing who you really are? Is this your song that plays out in the light of your days or do you save it for the molasses of night, that navy blanket peppered with holes of celestial light that covers you as your tears and sobbing rock you to sleep? Tears the world will never hear as you stifle them, stifle them from the ears that would listen and in their listening coax you out, call your heart to stand in day and lick the light.
Whose song? Tell me who’s song, I want to know, I want to know so I may shatter it against the wall of your insecurity and with one swoop send your blinding wall crumbling to the ground and shatter all that you fake yourself to be, all that you lie to yourself you are, all that you pretend to be so others will not feel small around you. And then as you lie broken and drowning in the ashes of your lies, I will watch, I will witness as that single tear falls, falls, falls, falls, from your heart, and watch it draw a circle in your bed of ashes, to carve light into your molasses night, so your dreams can come pouring in, so you can remember.
And you will sob, you will sob, your body wracked with the pain of exhaling your lies, your masks, your paralysing fear, your indecision, your self-doubt. And then, in your weakest moment, when your body is spent and your bones ache with the brittleness of all that letting go, and you cannot raise your head or a lift a finger, you will breathe again for the first time…
©Toni Stuart – Cape Town, June 17
