EXTENDED VERSION:

[A woman in her mid-thirties. Soft spoken but with an expression that denotes intelligence. She holds a cell phone.]

“My mother passed away recently… and quite unexpectedly.

The first few days after her death I missed her so badly that all I did was look at photos of her… I had this weird fear of forgetting what she looked like…

I went through every single photo she was in. I searched albums, shoeboxes, my phone, my computer…

I paid special attention to the portraits that captured her in a natural pose, unaware of the camera’s presence. I would stare at those images for so long… trying to get a glimpse into her soul, into her real self… and maybe because of that intensity, the photos began to lose their meaning.  After a while, they became mere representations of my mother… lies, in a way.

Then I moved on to her voicemails saved on my phone… dozens.

I listened to them over and over, very carefully, trying to find my mother in her short greetings, in her requests to call her back as soon as I had time…

They were satisfying at first…  like a comfort blanket…

Until one day her messages started to sound artificial… I could predict what she was about to say; I found myself mocking her inflections…

I realized that, like with the pictures, I had exhausted her recorded voice…

I was devastated, and frustrated. So much so that I began deleting all her messages, one by one…

Until I got to one that was almost two minutes long… I had always skipped it before because it was a butt call, you know, an accident…

All you can hear in it is a subtle breathing and some creaking sounds, maybe from the chair my mom was sitting on.

But that day I listened to the message, the whole thing this time…

I could feel my mother in that silence, as if she was alive, as if I was spying on her from behind a door. I was curious about her… asking myself what was she doing, what was she thinking…

I started crying half way into the recording.

I cried out of happiness because I’d finally felt her in that silence. I was more than happy, I was at peace… there she was, my mother, living in a question mark… in an unwritten story.

I deleted the other messages and kept only that one.

Sometimes I play it… but not too often… I’m afraid to wear it out too.”

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 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016