The sound of that voice,
that once knew all your silences.
You hear them after
years of absence.
Two people who once knew each other's breathing.
The sound of the trees dancing with the wind.
When no one asked them to.
When no one was watching.
It's the ocean.
The waves crashing in,
reaching the sand.
Pulling back.
Like everything does eventually.
It's the car alarm that goes off at three o'clock in the morning.
The one that cuts through your dream.
It's waking up.
It's having to wake up.
Alarms going off.
Snooze.
The coffee.
The boiling of the water.
The ritual of being alive
one more time.
It's the quiet over Colombo.
And then the blast.
The kind that empties the air before the sound arrives.
A high-pitched ringing in a child's ears
that drowned the screams kilometres away.
Screams you couldn't hear. But knew were there.
It's calm.
It's safe.
Those words we tell ourselves
when we need them to be true.
A combination of tone mixed with emotion.
You can't separate them anymore.
It's the guitar strums in the Sydney apartment.
Black coffee and three chords
when everything else stopped making sense.
It's the strings under your fingers
before your skin learned not to feel it.
The sound of becoming. Be loud. Be proud.
The voice finding its shape.
It's her voice saying
you sounded like someone worth hearing.
It's her hands on piano keys
reaching for Lennon finding something entirely her own.
You never told her that version was better.
You never told her a lot of things.
It's making you dance
when you said you were tired.
It moves through you
like it owns something in your nerves.
It's the song that puts babies to sleep;
because even at the beginning
we needed to be told
hush,
it's okay,
the dark isn't permanent.
It's the thing that finds the place in your chest
you forgot was soft.
That soothes the ear
the way forgiveness does.
It's all of it.
Every decibel you ever let in.
The ones that broke you open.
The ones that put you back together.
The ones you chose.
The ones you didn't.
Every frequency your body absorbed
and never fully released.
And at the end
it's that voice again.
The one that knew all your pauses.
The thing you let in.
The moments you didn't let go.
And you take your last breath.
The one sound
that doesn't need anything after it.