Sonority
The Loss of Resonance Sonority When I was five, I wanted to speak and be seen, and I was told that when grown ups talk, children are silent. I learned then that the table was not for me. I could not speak. I could not leave. I could only fall. I have fallen many times since — it feels like a drop in the chest, a vertigo with no edge to grab. A stranger across a table I just met, who pulls out her phone five minutes in and scrolls in silence while I become furniture. And before her, others. And before them, the relationship with "the one". That one was the longest fall of all. With her, the trap was not only mine. I never separated the space: my work bled into every room, every hour, so that I was always half-present, half-elsewhere. She never separated the time: there was no border between the hour to labor and the hour to share. So our expectations crossed in the dark. I divided my attention and called it devotion. She waited to be met and ...