The Voicemails I Can’t Listen To Yet

I canceled the PO Box I only ever got one letter from just before the renewal, but I wiggle the mouse on my Google Voice number when I get the routine email warning me that they’ll shut down my account after too much inactivity. 

The phone calls were the hardest. At first, she didn’t call at all. Finally, when she did, I missed the two calls that came one after the other because I was eating dinner and couldn’t get out the door fast enough to answer outside of my daughter’s hearing range. That was November of 2022, a few months after I’d taken my daughter to visit my aunt for the first time. I still have that first voicemail from my mother on my Google Voice account, her voice garbled and breath unsteady. The next call was the first of a batch of phone calls and wasn’t until after we met in July 2023. That’s the whole flurry of them, all the phone call times and voice messages recorded for me on that Google Voice account. And then the record ends. 

But I can’t listen to the voicemails. 

I can’t. 

Not yet.

Instead, I put together all of my poetry into one Google doc and started ordering the story. Instead, I made a title page and a copyright page and a dedication page to preface the collection. Instead, I let the words fall straight from my heart and onto the paper. Instead, I began asking my friends if they could help me honor my mother the only way I know how, by helping me publish something. I began asking them to witness my pain again, pain that ebbs and flows, but never goes. 

It makes more sense in ink, if you ask me. That’s all I ever knew of her until 2023, the letters and cards she would send me in the mail. But the pictures I took and the narrative I wrote of our two visits plus the Google Voice record of our phone calls and all the voicemails she left when I couldn’t pick up the phone, all of that is too real. I have the documentation, I have the record, but I can’t stand to look at it. A person I’d only ever known by the mark of her black pen became a person in a body, a body I needed to say goodbye to. 

So I’ll keep wiggling the mouse and making sure to keep the number active. I’ll be ready eventually, to finish the story as it really happened, but for now, I’ll take it one step at a time. That’s what healing is, sometimes, taking it one step at a time and reaching out to others when you need help finding your balance. 

Mirrors Made of Ink will be published March 25, 2024 in honor of my mother and in hopes that someone out there needs these words to see themselves reflected on the page the way I needed to see myself reflected in the ink.