Sleepless Voices ~ Vera Podell

I hear voices when I fall asleep. They first appeared a few years ago and now almost every night, when I close my eyes and come to the verge of consciousness – there they are, waiting. Most days they don’t speak in full sentences, they just utter bits of words in languages I do not understand – and I am not sure whether anyone understands, whether even the faces bearing those voices really get the meaning behind those phantoms of phrases. Some days they don’t speak at all – then they scream. And some days they cry. No matter how hard I’ve tried, I couldn’t ever find any connection between my own feelings and what voices sounded like. 

I told my psychiatrist about them and she said that it was all fine. 

One day a child was crying in the vacuum of my mind. The kid was bewilderingly loud, his cries were harrowing. I usually fell asleep a few minutes after I heard the voices but that day the child made me lose sleep completely. 

Another day a man was saying words in my mother tongue but it felt like he barely remembered how to say them. “Pomnyish,” he said “kogda to bylo inache” and it sounded wrong. I found myself afraid of one day becoming him – I fear forgetting my mother tongue completely. At least that voice remembers some of it, I console myself. 

It’s easier to pretend that man actually exists. It’s easier to pretend that the child doesn’t. 

Rarely I hear words in English and even less often they talk in German which I barely speak. Those are mostly women’s voices and they never speak exactly to me, they only speak to each other. I imagine them in their little cosmos and myself as a demiurge that might have once created them but doesn’t have access to their world anymore – or maybe doesn’t care enough to try to get it. 

I know they don’t exist – and still. 

I used to hope to hear the voices of the people I missed – and once I did, I started hoping to never once hear them again. I heard that voice once. It spoke rusty Russian. I recognized the voice immediately and got stunned and then I started crying – and I was that child – and I tried to answer – and I was that man, forgetting words. I wanted to speak to that voice but I was merely conscious and he wasn’t conscious at all – he doesn’t have a body, because he is gone, because he has been gone for years, because I still remember him, because it still hurts. A fleshless man-child that I was at that moment, I realized, that it hasn’t been long since he had died when I started hearing those sleepless voices that became so safe for me, so utterly home. 

I never heard him again. 

I fell asleep last night and it was silent and for a second there I got scared for the fleshless creations of my own mind. From the very beginning they were gone already – and still.