Strep Throat

I know I haven't written in awhile and the only reason (excuse) I can give you is that my voice is tired. Not my physical voice, but my writing voice. The last two and a half months I've been yelling so much on the inside that it's gotten really sore. It does not sound like an old jazz musician. The cool roughness that they have, the passion. It sounds more like I've been smoking for fifty years. The voice you'd hear from an old woman playing slot machines with an oxygen tank over her mouth...the death.

I know my voice is there and at times I've tried speaking. Words come out but not sentences and I sit and stare at the screen. "I wonder if I keep typing that eventually a sentence will form?" That thought runs through my head a million times a second only to find out that the answer is no. No matter how many times I try speaking, it's just a combination of jibber and jabber. I am like a toddler trying to speak his first words. The parents stare, encouraging me to speak and I stare back talking because I think it's what I'm doing. In reality, I'm just mashing sounds together because in my head, that seems like the right thing.

Sometimes I wonder if not using my voice is the right thing. Even when I know I'm bruised and beat down I want to say something but feel that it isn't the time. It's just not the time for my voice to be heard and so I store it away, thinking that I'll remember it only to find it in a pair of pant’s pocket a year later wondering why I never used it. Thinking that that was a good idea and how could I forget it, but I do.

I know my voice is just wanting to get better...it's sleeping. A big bear, dreaming. Dreaming of how powerful it will be once it opens it eyes from the slumber. It will eat fish, for energy and look to climb the biggest mountain in the woods. The air will be thin but the voice will span throughout the land like a storm sweeping in from the North, letting everyone and everything know that it's back. Letting them know that it wasn't forgotten, that it's not dead and that it is time to be heard again.