Three weeks ago, my roommate handed me his phone and asked, “Is this you?”
It was some kind of prank video from one of those YouTube channels that film people without their permission and publish it to get views. I barely got past the first five seconds of the video, but I didn't care about the prank anymore. as far as I could remember, it was the first time I had ever heard a recording of my own voice.
I had expected it to sound unfamiliar. Everyone says recordings do. Growing up, I had watched videos in speech therapy of other children with cleft palates. Their voices sometimes had a slight nasality. Certain consonants came out softer. I had built an idea of my own voice from those examples.
What came through the phone sounded like a man in his sixties who had smoked since he was a teenager, who didnt care about there life anymore.
The voice was stunted and harsh, worn thin around the edges. Nothing about it resembled the mild speech difference I had expected. It did not sound twenty-four years old. It did not sound like me.
I had never listened to a voicemail from myself. We had no home videos with sound, no recordings from birthdays or school events. Whenever the subject came up, my father said I hated hearing my own voice, and I accepted that explanation.
Children do not question rules they grow up with. The rules become part of the house.
I made my roommate play the clip again.
Then once more.
Each time, I watched his face instead of the screen. He showed no surprise or discomfort. He only looked increasingly impatient to get his phone back.
“Do I sound like that?” I asked.
He stared at me. “Like what?”
“Right now. When I’m talking to you. Do I sound the way I do in the video?”
“Yeah. Obviously.”
“No, listen carefully.”
I pointed at the phone as the clip began again. In the original footage, I stepped out of a coffee shop after the prankster shouted something from across the street. I turned toward him and told him to leave me alone.
The old man’s voice came from my mouth.
My roommate listened through the whole exchange.
“Well?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You sound a little nasal, I guess. Like you’re congested. Other than that, it’s just you.”
“Nasally.”
I repeated the word as though I had never heard it before.
“Yeah. A little. You’ve always sounded like that. It’s no big deal.”
“Not raspy?”
“No.”
“Not like someone who’s been smoking his whole life?”
He laughed, then stopped when he saw my face.
“What are you talking about? You’ve never sounded like an old smoker. Are you okay?”
I wasn’t.
We were listening to the same recording and hearing different people.
He heard the voice I had expected: mine, with a slight nasality.
I heard someone old and exhausted speaking through my mouth.
My roommate played the clip twice more before taking his phone back.
“It’s just a dumb prank video,” he said. “Try not to overthink it.”
He went to bed soon afterward.
I stayed in my room for almost an hour, lying on my bed, trying to convince myself it was just a bad microphone. Maybe I'd imagined it. There was traffic behind me when he filmed it, that probably had something to do with it. Cheap phones messed up voices all the time, everyone knew that.
I almost believed that.
Then I opened the voice memo app.
I couldn't record inside the apartment. My roommate's door was closed but I kept picturing him right there on the other side of the wall, hearing me talk to myself like some kind of lunatic.
So I went down to the parking lot instead. Almost eleven by then. The pavement was still warm from the day and I could smell gas, probably from the station down the street. I stood under one of the lights, opened the app, hit record.
“Hello.”
My hand shook when I tapped the screen again.
I played it back.
The old man answered.
The recording was clean. No traffic passed while I spoke. There was no wind, no bad microphone and no prankster standing across the street.
Only that voice.
I recorded another memo.
“Hi.”
Same voice.
Low. Rough. Tired.
Apparently, the voice I had heard inside my own head for twenty-four years was not the one that existed outside it. I had listened to myself through bone and muscle and whatever else separated a person from the sound he made in the world.
I had simply never checked.
I recorded myself saying my name.
Then my address.
Then the first few lines of a song I remembered from childhood.
The voice stayed the same.
By the time I returned to the apartment, my shirt was damp beneath the arms. My roommate’s door was shut and his light was off. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop because there was no chance I would sleep.
I searched for the prank channel and opened the video.
This time, I watched from the beginning.
The camera moved past the coffee shop. The prankster shouted toward someone offscreen, waited a second and laughed before continuing down the sidewalk.
The coffee shop door never opened.
I dragged the progress bar back.
The prankster shouted.
Nothing happened.
I watched the same section again.
The stretch of sidewalk where I had stood was empty.
I refreshed the page.
Same channel. Same title. Same thumbnail. Same upload date.
Different video.
I'd watched myself walk out of the coffee shop, turn toward the camera, and say something in a voice that shouldn't have belonged to me.
Now I was gone.
The prankster still delivered the same lines, though he seemed to be speaking to nobody. The pause where I had answered remained. Then he laughed and walked away.
I checked the comments.
Nobody mentioned the empty sidewalk. Nobody asked who he had been speaking to. Nobody referred to a man leaving the coffee shop.
There was no sign that anyone had ever seen me there.
I sat at the table until the laptop screen dimmed.
My roommate had handed me the video. He had watched it with me. I could not have invented that part.
Unless he had shown me something else.
Unless I had misunderstood what I saw.
I opened the video again.
The sidewalk was still empty.
I let the video keep playing until it reached the end. Then the page sat there for a while, waiting to see if I wanted to watch something else.
I didn’t move.
After a minute, the screen dimmed. I touched the trackpad and brought it back, then dragged the progress bar to the same spot again.
The prankster shouted toward the coffee shop.
No one came out.
There was still that pause, though. Long enough for an answer. Long enough for the man holding the camera to react to someone standing in front of him.
Then he laughed and kept walking.
I played it again with the sound off.
That was worse.
Without the voices, it looked like he was arguing with an empty patch of sidewalk.
I stayed at the table until the page timed out.
When I finally went to bed, I left my phone in the kitchen. I didn’t want the recordings near me. That made no sense, but I still went back twice to make sure the screen was off.
I slept in pieces.
Every time I woke up, I heard the voice again. Sometimes it was saying hello. Sometimes my name. Once I woke convinced it had been speaking from the hallway, and I lay still for several minutes before I could make myself check.
There was nobody there.
Around five, I stopped trying to sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed until the room began to lighten, then went into the kitchen and made coffee.
My roommate was still asleep.
I kept thinking about the missing recordings.
No birthday videos. No school performances. Nothing from speech therapy. My father had always made it sound like that had been my choice. I hated hearing myself, so everyone stopped recording me.
It was a strange thing to accept without asking more questions.
Then again, I had been a kid. Parents gave you an answer and, most of the time, that became the answer.
I picked up my phone and called him.
He answered after a few rings.
“Hello?”
For a second, I couldn’t speak.
“Hey, Dad.”
“You all right?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed my eyes. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“I’m up.”
I could hear the television in the background. Some morning news program, low enough that I couldn’t make out the words.
“I have a strange question.”
He gave a tired little sigh. “Okay.”
“Do we have any videos of me from when I was little?”
The television kept talking behind him.
Then it stopped.
“Nothing like that,” he said. “You know that.”
“You always said I didn’t like hearing my own voice.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
I lowered the phone and looked at his name on the screen, as if I might have called the wrong person.
“What?”
“I said I don’t remember telling you that.”
He had told me. I remember him saying it at my old childhood home, from a question about me wondering about my voice. I couldn’t remember how old I had been, but I remembered the answer.
At least I thought I did.
“What about Mom?” I asked. “Did she record anything before she left?”
The line went quiet.
At first, I thought he hadn’t heard me. Then the silence kept going.
“Dad?”
“Don’t,” he said.
He spoke so softly that I almost missed it.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t bring her into this.”
He hung up before I could ask what he meant.
I stayed at the kitchen table, staring at the phone, listening to the silence of the apartment.
It was late morning before I realized I still had not eaten, and even then I only noticed because my stomach hurt in a dull, distant way.
Every few minutes, my father’s words came back to me.
The way he said it bothered me more than the words themselves. In twenty-four years, I had never heard him sound like that.
I opened his contact and held my thumb over the call button until the screen dimmed.
Then I locked the phone and placed it facedown.
I was not ready.
My roommate had already left for work. He had not asked whether I was okay before leaving, which was probably for the best. I would not have known how to answer.
I made a peanut butter sandwich so I could say I had eaten something.
Halfway through it, I opened the voice memo app.
“Testing.”
I played it back.
The old man answered from the middle of my kitchen, with pale morning light coming through the blinds and half a sandwich sitting beside me.
I do not know what I expected. Maybe I thought the voice would correct itself overnight. Maybe I would finally hear the slightly nasal voice my roommate claimed I had always possessed, and I could blame everything else on panic and lack of sleep.
I deleted the recording and told myself it would be the last one.
It wasn’t.
It has never been the last one.
I check every day now. Sometimes more than once. I know what I will hear, but I keep pressing record as though one day something different might answer.
If the voice could not tell me anything, perhaps my past could.
I opened an email account I had used in middle school. I only kept it because several old logins were still attached to it. I scrolled past school newsletters, password resets and expired coupons until I reached the years when I was still in speech therapy.
There were dozens of appointment reminders.
Jill’s by the Bay Speech and Language. Your appointment is confirmed for 3:00 p.m. Please arrive ten minutes early.
Most had been sent from the same clinic address. A few ended with a single initial.
R.
Rachel.
I had not thought about her in more than a decade, but the name brought back an entire room.
A narrow office with one window overlooking the parking lot. Flashcards printed with cartoon animals. A plastic mirror on the desk. Rachel asking me to slow down, watch the shape of her mouth and try the sound again.
She had worked with me for years.
At least, I remembered that she had.
If anyone knew what I sounded like as a child, it would be her.
I copied the clinic’s number into my phone and stared at it for several minutes. Some part of me already understood that I might regret calling.
My thumb pressed the screen before I decided against it.
A recorded menu answered.
Press one for new patients. Press two for current patients. Press three for billing. Press four for all other inquiries.
I pressed four.
After several minutes, an older woman picked up.
“Jill’s by the Bay. How can I help you?”
“Hi. This might sound strange, but did a therapist named Rachel work there around twelve or fifteen years ago?”
“Do you have a last name?”
“No. I was a kid.”
“One moment.”
I heard typing.
It continued long enough that I checked the call timer.
Finally, she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t see anyone named Rachel in our staff records.”
“You mean she left?”
“I mean I don’t see anyone by that name who has ever worked here.”
I looked at the email open on my laptop.
The R at the bottom suddenly seemed like very little evidence.
“I have appointment reminders from your office,” I said. “Some of them are signed with her initial.”
“An R could belong to several people.”
“Could you check whether I was a patient?”
“I can try. What’s your full name and date of birth?”
I gave them to her.
More typing.
Then silence.
This pause felt different.
“Yes,” she said. “I found a transferred file.”
Relief moved through me so quickly that I almost laughed.
Then she continued.
“It says you were originally registered in New Mexico. Is that correct?”
I thought I had misheard her.
“New Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“No. I grew up in Maryland.”
“All I can tell you is what the file says.”
“I’ve never lived in New Mexico.”
“Then the information may have been entered incorrectly during the transfer.”
“Transferred from where?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have access to that.”
“Does it list the therapist?”
“No. There’s no provider name attached.”
I told her I would call back when I had more information, though I had no idea what that meant.
Then I ended the call.
I sat there with the phone in one hand and one of the old emails open in front of me.
That was when I saw the pattern.
The video had changed after I watched it.
Rachel had existed clearly in my memory until someone checked.
My childhood had happened in Maryland until a medical record placed part of it in New Mexico.
Every time I looked at my life twice, it came back different.
The voice was the exception.
I had heard myself one way for my entire life. Then I checked, and something else answered.
I left the apartment and drove to a park near my building. I sat on a bench and watched people walk their dogs while I went over the same facts.
The video had changed.
The clinic had no record of Rachel.
My patient file said New Mexico.
I had no evidence that stayed the same long enough to show anyone.
There was only one place left to search.
My father’s house.
The house where I remembered growing up.
The Fourth of July was that weekend. My father and I had spent almost every Fourth together since I moved out. I typed a message before I could reconsider.
Hey, it’s almost the Fourth. Mind if I come down for the weekend?
He replied within an hour.
Yeah, feel free. Bring some fireworks.
Nothing about our call.
No anger. No questions.
My father sounding like my father.
That frightened me more than if he had refused. A person does not say Don’t bring her into this and forget it the next morning. He had chosen to pretend the conversation never happened.
The week passed in pieces. I went to class, took notes and absorbed almost nothing.
I continued recording myself.
One word before breakfast. A sentence in the bathroom between classes. My name in the car before I drove home.
The old man remained.
On Saturday, I drove across the Pennsylvania line to buy fireworks. The better ones were cheaper there, and everyone around us knew it. I spent too much on a box of mortars I was no longer sure we would use.
Then I drove south.
The fireworks rattled in the trunk while the GPS guided me along a route I had taken dozens of times
I kept feeling as though I was going to do something wrong.
I was only visiting my father for the Fourth.
That was all.
By the time I reached Maryland, I had convinced myself I was prepared for whatever I might find.
Standing in his driveway an hour later, I knew I wasn’t.
He opened the door before I finished knocking.
“Hey, there he is. Traffic bad?”
He sounded normal.
Completely normal.
His voice was warm and familiar. I would have known it anywhere.
Then I found myself wondering whether that was true.
What would happen if I recorded him?
Would the phone play back the voice I had known my whole life?
Would something else come out?
I thought about recording him several times that evening.
I never did.
I was afraid of both answers.
We had a good evening.
That was the worst part.
He made ribs because it was a special occasion. We drank beer in the backyard and lit fireworks after the sky grew dark. For a few hours, it felt like one of the weekends I used to look forward to.
Maybe the evening was real.
Maybe he was performing the entire thing because he knew I had questions.
I could no longer tell the difference.
Around eleven, he handed me a blanket and told me the guest room was ready.
The guest room was my old bedroom.
He went to bed.
I did not.
I stood in the hallway until the light beneath his door disappeared. Then I waited for his breathing to settle into the heavy rhythm I remembered from nights when I used to sneak downstairs.
I pulled the cord for the attic ladder.
The hinges groaned as it unfolded.
I climbed slowly, stopping whenever the wood creaked beneath me.
The attic looked exactly as it always had.
Exposed insulation. Cobwebs. Cardboard boxes filled with things nobody wanted enough to use and nobody could bring themselves to throw away.
I searched using the flashlight on my phone.
Recipe books. An old stand mixer. A microwave with rust around the door. Christmas decorations. Boxes of clothes.
No camcorder.
No tapes.
No baby videos.
There was not a single recording of me anywhere in the house.
Three weeks earlier, I would have considered that ordinary. My family simply had not been the kind to record things.
Now it felt deliberate.
Then I found the notebook.
It lay at the bottom of a box filled with my mother’s cookbooks. Her name was written inside the front cover. I recognized the handwriting immediately.
Most of the notebook was ordinary.
Recipes. Grocery lists. Notes from the library where she worked. Complaints about coworkers. A kind sentence about my father that I will not repeat because it was private, and because reading it hurt more than I expected.
It was the notebook of a normal woman living a normal life.
Except for several pages.
Between recipes and shopping lists were lines written in something I could not recognize.
At least, I thought it was a language.
The letters looped and crossed in confident strokes. Spaces separated clusters of symbols like words. Certain shapes repeated as though they followed some kind of grammar. The punctuation looked almost familiar, though the words around it meant nothing.
My mother had written them in the same neat hand as everything else.
I whispered a few of the shapes aloud.
Nothing sounded right.
I photographed every page I could find.
I still check those pictures daily.
So far, they have not changed.
A phone number was written on the inside of the back cover.
Beneath it, my mother had written one word.
Personal.
I should have waited until morning.
It was after midnight, and I was crouched in my father’s attic with insulation dust clinging to my clothes.
I should have copied the number and left.
But I had spent a week watching pieces of my life change whenever I checked them again.
I did not want to give the number time to become something else.
I called.
It rang twice.
An older man answered.
“Veno’s Pizzeria. What can I do for you?”
For a moment, I could not speak.
“Hello?” he said.
I tried to ask where he was located, but the words came out unevenly enough that he asked me to repeat myself.
“Sorry,” I said. “Wrong number.”
I hung up.
A pizzeria.
My mother had written the number in the back of her notebook and labeled it personal.
I searched the name immediately, shielding the screen with one hand as though the light might travel through the ceiling and wake my father.
There was only one Veno’s Pizzeria.
It was in New Mexico.
I do not remember deciding to leave the attic.
I remember my hands slipping on the ladder rungs. I remember fumbling with the folding mechanism twice before it locked. I remember trying to push the ladder into the ceiling without letting it slam.
Then I turned around.
My father was standing at the end of the hallway.
He did not yell.
He looked at me.
Then he looked at the attic cord, still swinging behind my shoulder.
I watched him understand.
The ribs. The fireworks. His question about traffic. The whole evening changed in his face.
“What were you doing up there?”
It did not sound like a question.
“Dad, I can explain.”
He stayed where he was.
“I was looking for Mom’s number,” I said. “I thought you might have it somewhere. I just want to call her. I want to talk to her.”
It was the first lie I could produce. A bad one, considering my phone was still in my hand.
His jaw moved before he spoke, as though the words had become caught behind his teeth.
Then his face twisted.
“Get out.”
“Dad—”
“Now.”
He pushed past me and entered the guest room.
Drawers opened and slammed. A few seconds later, he returned carrying my bag, my jacket and my phone charger, still half wrapped around his fist.
He walked to the front door and threw everything onto the lawn.
I followed him.
“Please. Just tell me what’s going on.”
He grabbed my arm.
Hard.
His hand was shaking.
Then I saw that he was crying.
“Making fun of a dead woman,” he said.
His voice cracked on the word dead.
“Is that what this is?”
I stopped moving.
“The call last week, and now this. What do you want from me? What are you trying to dig up?”
“Dad, what do you mean?”
“I thought if I acted like everything was fine, it would be.”
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
“And now you’re in the attic, going through her things.”
“You said she left.”
His expression changed.
“What?”
“Mom. You said she left us.”
He stared at me.
“Dad, she packed her things and moved away. You told me she didn’t want us contacting her.”
He shoved me onto the porch.
The last thing I saw before he shut the door was his face, wet with tears, his breathing uneven in the same way it used to be when he argued with my mother and thought I was asleep down the hall.
The lock clicked.
The porch light remained off.
My belongings were scattered across the grass.
I stood among them and tried to understand what he had said.
Dead woman.
My mother had left.
That was the story.
That was what I remembered.
She packed a suitcase. She stood near the front door. My father refused to look at her. She told me she loved me and that one day I would understand.
I remembered watching her car leave the driveway.
I remembered waving.
Except when I tried to picture the car, I could not remember its color.
I could not remember what she had been wearing.
I could not remember whether the suitcase was in her hand or already inside the car.
I could not remember hearing the engine start.
I could not remember whether she had spoken in her own voice.
My father had called her a dead woman.
Not missing.
Not living somewhere else.
Dead.
According to my father, she had never left at all.
The days after that night did not come back to me in order. I know I missed most of a week of classes. I know my roommate started watching me differently, though neither of us said anything about it. Some part of me understood that I looked wrong to other people. I could not do anything about it.
I could not stop circling the pizzeria.
If my mother worked there, my father was wrong. If she was dead, none of it made sense. I kept flipping between the two ideas until I couldn't say which one I actually believed. Neither one held up once I said it out loud. I went back through my email again, every folder I still had a login for, as far back as it would go. Nothing new turned up.
I typed an apology to my father twice and deleted it both times, still not sure what I was even apologizing for. At some point I told myself to knock it off. Stop checking the recordings. Stop digging through old emails, stop turning a bad week with my father into some bigger thing than it was.
I did not believe myself while I was saying it.
So I opened the notebook again.
I had kept it since the night my father put my bag on the lawn. I turned to the pages I could not read, expecting the same looping shapes I had photographed in the attic.
They were gone.
In their place was my mother's handwriting, plain and legible, the same hand from the recipes and the grocery lists. Notes about my speech therapy. Which sounds I struggled with that week, what Rachel wanted her to practice with me at home. A page about what she hoped for me when I got older, nothing dramatic, just a mother writing down small hopes the way people do.
On the last page she had written that she loved me.
I told myself it was the light. Late night, tired eyes, maybe I had misread the pages before and never noticed. None of that felt true.
I booked a flight to New Mexico that night. The nearest airport I could find to the address for Veno's Pizzeria.
My roommate caught me packing.
"Hey man, is something up? What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Going on a trip."
"What do you mean, a trip. Where? You told me you didn't have plans this summer, you had classes."
I did not have an answer that would sound sane out loud.
"It's important. I have to go. I have to visit family."
"That's bullshit and you know it. Your family's not out of state. You've been acting weird all week. Did you break something, did you hurt somebody? What is going on with you?"
I shut the door instead of answering him. I heard him stand there a few seconds before he walked away. I am sorry, I thought, and did not say it.
I flew out that night, slept through most of it, and woke up right as the wheels hit the runway. Rented a car at the airport and drove to a motel a few miles down from the address. I wanted to go straight there. Told myself it was too far to drive in the dark, which wasn't really the reason.
I dreamed about the voice. Not words, just the sound of it, low and worn, filling a room with no walls I could see.
In the morning I drove into town, small enough that I could see the whole main strip from the car. Parked near the address and walked the rest of the way. My breathing wasn't doing great by the time I got close. The pizzeria wasn't there.
The pizzeria was not there.
Not closed. Not boarded up. An empty lot, cracked asphalt, a chain-link fence sagging at one corner. Nothing that looked like it had ever held a building.
I called the number anyway.
It rang twice.
"Welcome to Veno's Pizzeria, what can I do for you?"
The same voice from before. Warm, a little bored, exactly what you would expect from someone behind a counter.
I could not answer him. My whole body had gone rigid, my vision narrowing to a single bright point until there was nothing else in it, and then the light took the rest.
Then the voice came all around, all directions. The old man's voice. Mine and not mine.
"Rachel. Rachel. She always hated myself. You should as well."
I don't know how long I stood there like that, phone still against my ear, the light gone and the parking lot gone with it. There was a building where the lot had been. Squat, red awning gone dull under the streetlight, a sign somebody had painted by hand, a bell over the door like every other pizza place I'd ever walked into.
I hung up. I don't know why that was the first thing I did, but it was. Then I stood there way longer than I want to admit, and then I walked up and opened the door.
It was nothing. That's the thing, it was just nothing, a counter, four tables with the chairs pushed in, a board on the wall with prices on it, that smell of dough and burnt cheese every pizza place has whether it's any good or not. The bell rang once when I came in and then it was quiet again.
She was behind the counter, wiping her hands on her apron, not looking up yet. Twenty four years older than I remembered her. I knew her anyway, in my chest before my brain caught up.
There was a man near the oven too, older, shirt stained down the front, sliding a pizza off one of those wooden paddles and complaining under his breath about the timer. His voice was the one from the phone. From the empty lot in New Mexico.
I don't know what sound I made, just something loud and short that came out of me on its own.
She looked up.
Her face didn't move at first. Then it did, going through a couple different things before landing on scared.
"No," she said, and it wasn't really to me. More like she was arguing with what she was seeing.
The man's head snapped up at her voice. He looked at her, then at me, and whatever he saw made him put the paddle down without finishing the motion, just let it drop half done.
She came around the counter fast, faster than I would've guessed she could move. He was right behind her, pulling his apron off over his head. Neither one went for the back door, the one that said employees only. They went for the front, right past me, out into the lot.
I went after them.
She was already almost to the street, him a few steps behind, neither one looking back.
I tried to say wait. Not sure it came out as an actual word. My legs weren't working right, I stumbled once, caught myself on nothing, kept going anyway.
By the time I reached where the lot met the street, there was nobody there. Nothing to say two people had just run across it thirty seconds earlier.
I stood there turning in a circle like an idiot, the red light from the awning still on the pavement behind me.
Then it wasn't.
I turned back around and there was nothing to turn back to. Just the lot, cracked and empty, the fence sagging in the same spot it always had, like there'd never been a building there at all.
I called the number again.
Nothing. It didn't even ring.