Or to lose in plain sight
When you were first ill, when Spring was playing its final (muted) crescendo, I would place my phone beneath the dinner table and press a little red button to record all our supper voices. We were all together then, both by law and by choice, and I have evidence now of how happy we all were and could be. The most precious is a recording — half finished, for unknown reasons — where you recite a poem in Hungarian about my name. The audio notes are not comprehensive. Muffled conversations in summer and autumn can only exist in the annuls of our minds. I need no more than what I have gathered to preserve the cadences of our family.
I recently listened to one of my digital preservations, unleashing the sound like trapped butterflies in a jam jar. There are no ways to describe the universe-warping feeling of not recognising your own mother’s voice. What I could hear, were the smiles caught in your words, bringing the disembodied voice closer to that I hold in my corroded memory. I think the misrecognition was a symptom of the lie of living everyday with a change so constant that the origin is effaced — your voice is slower now — careful and deep, as if emanating from the depths of your body.
At this juncture, there is no more to say other than that you are a precious perfect exercise in tenacity.
