Until Human Voices Wake Us

He stood at the bedroom window, watching the storm come in: grey leviathans rolling across the distant horizon. As he watched the darkening of the city, he noticed the cars that seemed to flee from the storm; the one-way street beneath his window ran directly into the darkness, the cars travelling quickly away from its immanent rains.

As he stood silently, awaiting the torrent, the walls began to whisper quickly, mimicking the sound of raindrops. They related a different story with each drop – melodrama, mystery, betrayal, sadness and joy. These stories could easily have been his; they could have just as easily belonged to each vehicle passing into and out of his view.

As he watched, the rain slowly washed the outer world away. Soon, all the remained afloat were the stories lived, the memories shared and half-forgotten.

As she approached from behind, he barely heard her soft footsteps amongst the sounds of the storm. She stood beside him, gazing contently out the window at the ever-changing shades of grey. Her breath softly brushed the side of his neck, expressing in its gentle rhythm every story they’ve ever lived, every emotion that ever rioted that gentle breath into quick gasps. All the world was contained in the subtle sweetness of her breathing, the unconscious patterns perfectly complementing the string of single moments held within the aging walls.

As the world was washed away in the inevitable storm, all that remained, all that mattered, was the single moment, holding within it all the world that, to them, had ever existed.

Softly, she whispered into his ear, “How long are we going to stay here?”

He stood silent for a moment before answering, “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”





They lived in a world of dreams – ideas and expressions, liquidly rolling over one another, buffeting against the sheer cliffs of reality, occasionally breaking into an innovation, a realization, a remembrance of something long ago forgotten.

The only escape now was through the storm. In the towering thunderclouds and torrential rains, all men were once again equal. The fire that flashed through the darkened sky and the wind that whipped through the flat lands did not discriminate between rich and poor, male and female. When the world darkened and succumbed to the storm, absolute power was no longer in the hands of man.

In the storm was also a reminder: of our individual insignificance, yet quiet importance, and of our unified grandeur.

The electricity raced through her as though this was the only part of the world in which she still felt she belonged.

The power of the storm left him in awe of the gathering thunderclouds and the shaking earth.

Within the storm, they could feel at once separated from and unified with all that they ever were and ever could be.

The world that shimmered just beneath the surface buzzed with mystery, creativity, wonder and magic. He lifted his fingers and placed them lightly on the glass, craving the electricity that filled the atmosphere, marvelling at the power that was wrested from human hands, the power that shook the world almost to pieces under the fury of the storm.




He sat and quietly listened to the walls whisper stories of their otherwise forgotten past.

“I’m not sure what to do.”

The scene began to materialize in front of his eyes, like a dream reappearing in conscious thought.

Two women sat on a bed at the opposite end of the room. One of them looked worried; she spoke quickly, the words tumbling out of her mouth perhaps before she could even imagine their consequence. She fidgeted through the entire conversation, crossing and uncrossing her legs, turning her wedding ring on her finger, twisting the string of hair that hung loose on her bare neck.

“He called you today?” The other women didn’t look too concerned. She spoke calmly, as though the melodrama unfolding before her occurred every day without remark.

Her friend nodded. “He wanted to have dinner with me. He sent me flowers! When I got home yesterday, a bouquet of daisies sat on the front porch, with a poem inside.” She paused for a moment, staring intently into her lap. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Ignore him.” There was not hesitation in the response. “You haven’t seen him for, what, fifteen years? He didn’t even treat you that well when you knew him.”

The woman remained silent, still staring into her lap.

“He didn’t, right? You’re not thinking of going to see him, are you?” The emotion finally seemed to register in the other woman’s voice. “You know what he wants.”

She looked up shyly. “Yes.”

“And…”

“And…” she couldn’t finish the sentence, but instead went back to watching her hands as they fidgeted in her lap.

She wasn’t happy. Her friend must not have known it until that moment, but the expression on her face revealed all. The thought had seriously crossed her mind: leaving. For a day, a week, forever? Her mouth was drawn tight, her brow wrinkled as she thought intensely over what to do. The emotion reflected in her eyes was not the happiness of years before, but the accumulation of years’ worth of disappointments. She had steeled herself against the decision that she was now about to make.

“I’m going to see him.”

“Why?” The second woman obviously did not understand the rationale behind such an impulsive move. “You were in love with him and he left, disappeared off the face of the earth only to reappear years later unannounced and expecting a free entry back into your life.”

Again, the first woman didn’t say anything, but just looked at her friend with rather sorrowful eyes.

“You aren’t thinking of leaving, are you?”

No response. The first woman managed a slight gulp that was quite visible amidst her otherwise silence.

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Who?”

“You’re husband.”

She looked back into her lap, no longer able to hold her friend’s gaze. “I…don’t know.”




Thunder rose from the belly of an approaching storm and shook him out of the fading memory.

They seemed to become more frequent when the weather changed. With the rain came stories from lives past; as the temperature dropped, so did the level of reality within the house. A sudden streak of lightning could rip through the fabric of the world and reveal a new one beneath. As the world shook at the mercy of the storm, a strange sense of mystery descended upon the small town. The world beneath the storm, he knew, was a different one than the one that bubbled up out of the periods of calm.

As a vase shattered somewhere beyond his vision, he knew that he was about to entire another life.

“What are you doing?” She shrieked at the man lying beneath the covers, in a bed now placed in a different area of the room.

A shadow fled the scene, making only a brief impression on the field of view of any observer.
The woman picked up a picture frame and hurled it at the wall beside his head. At her feet lay the broken vase that had ushered in the memory.

“I…she…” He couldn’t manage a response. He looked forlornly at the door, and then gazed back at the woman standing in front of him – his fiancé, judging from the identical engagement bands adorning both their fingers. “I’m sorry?” As a question, it seemed only to anger her further.

She managed to stop herself for a moment and took a deep breath, her shoulders heaving with the effort. “Is this…the first time?” Her anger seemed to be turning to fear.

Still lying on the bed, he didn’t seem to share her emotional turmoil. He didn’t answer the question, but just continued to stare at her, looking neither frightened nor remorseful.
She shrieked again, no words accompanying the raging animal-like sound that erupted from her throat. Before leaving the room, she looked at the empty dresser-top beside her, possibly searching for another heavy object to throw. No last words or sounds passed her lips as she stormed out of the room, slamming the door hard enough to knock the photos, hanging nearby, to the floor.

When he finally got out of bed to look for her, she was gone.

He had seen this memory before, from a different perspective. The woman didn’t return. The man who had borne the brunt of her anger had kept her possessions in the house, occasionally walking the hallways and through the near-empty rooms, looking over and over again at the photos still adorning the surfaces.

Eventually she would come back to a changed man.




“Hey.” She softly whispered the word in his ear. She had managed to walk up beside him while he was lost in someone else’s memory. “Where were you?”

“Somewhere else. In this room, of course, but somewhere else.” His spoke softly, his emotions still turned inward, reflecting on the experiences replaying themselves before his eyes.

She kept quiet, moving closer to him and laying a reassuring hand on his soft, warm arm.

“They all seem so real.” He was always moved by the experiences that got trapped in collective memory, playing over and over in different forms and in different lives. The happiness, the sorrows, the disappointments – they all played themselves out as though they were themselves a part of the transparent fabric of time. They never ceased. Like the participants, the experiences never died. They were relived in different contexts and remembered by those who followed in the paths already created.

“Why aren’t we there?” He mentioned it quietly, only half expecting an answer. His gaze wandered from her delicate face to the thick window, watching as nighttime began to fall on the distant trees.

“Where?” She asked softly, her voice only just above a whisper.

“In the paths? Why don’t we follow a predestined way of live? Like our parents did, or like our friends do, like the world wants us to?”

“Is that where you really want to be?”
He turned to her and immediately knew the answer. The untarnished love and contentment that showed so obviously in her face spoke the answer more clearly than any explanation could.

“No. I think it’s better to be on the edges. Sometimes I like to dive into the thrall; I like the feeling of being a piece in a huge interacting puzzle of society – the excitement, the emotion, the pandemonium. But it’s too much to live it always.” He looked back out the window at the approaching dusk – the time of day that he treasured, the time for quiet reflection, the time when the world seemed to spin just a little slower, when the weight on his shoulders lightened and he was able to forget the chaos of the daytime. “I like it here.” He turned back to her. “In this moment.”



She rushed into the room and threw her arms around him. “I love you.” She kissed him on the cheek quickly before rushing back out of the room.

He was always relieved when he was thrown into a happy memory. There were moments that frightened him, moments when he almost believed that he would be physically involved in the trauma and turmoil playing out before his eyes.

She came back and sat down on the worn couch beside him. He took her hand in his as they watched the world beyond their room passing routinely by the old picture window.

“Do you ever wonder what goes on in those people’s lives?”

“Whose?” He was pretty sure he knew the answer, but he questioned her anyway, an easy way to keep the relaxed conversation going.

“The people in the cars. There’s so many of them. They drive past every day, going to and from their destinations, in little self contained vehicles with no concern about the human drama playing out just beyond their doors. Maybe that man’s wife is pregnant. Maybe he’s just bought her flowers and now he’s going home to see her. Maybe he’s heading away from home towards the abode of a lover.” They could barely distinguish the details of the people in the cars, but some drove by slow enough for her to identify the number passengers and their gender. “Or maybe her husband’s having an affair. Maybe this guy just published a novel that will change that world –” she nodded to each car as she referenced it “—or at least part of it.”

He turned to her and smiled. They continued narrating people’s lives as they past, turning it into a game, until she curled up beside him and closed her eyes. As she fell into a light sleep, a faint smile stayed on her lips.



He was always impressed with how little it seemed to take to bring happiness to people’s lives: time devoted to a simple task, small gestures that prove someone cares. In comparison, the melodrama he occasionally experienced, witnessed, took much more planning and effort; he sometimes wondered why more people weren’t happy.



“In the end, it is inconsequential whether the balance is tallied.” He muttered the words in a statement that she could not interpret.

“Pardon?”

The two of them lay quietly on the king size bed, staring at the florescent plastic stars glued to the ceiling.

“It doesn’t matter.” He turned to look at her. “Whether we figure it all out. Before we die, in our waking life, it doesn’t matter if all of our experiences can be tallied into a single Meaning.” He had verbally capitalized the last word.
She recognized the subject; she had listened to many existential dilemmas in their time together, but she could not grasp what he was getting at or why it was bothering him now. At a loss for words, she grasped his fingers in hers.

“It’s not that that matters, anyway. It doesn’t matter whether we figure it all out before we die, and it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter.”

She continued to stare at the ceiling, not following the thoughts that were following so freely through his mind.

“See, this moment, right now, is all that matters. And in the next, it will be the most important. They’re just a collection of experiences, each valuable in their own right, but trying to reduce them all to an equivalent language of metaphysical meaning is lost.”



He left the window and sat down on the bed.

The philosophical moments were sometimes the hardest ones to follow. It made him wonder how many people had actually passed through this room, how varied each person had been and yet how remarkably similar in their efforts to cope, to understand, to create a comprehensible section of the world that they could call their very own.
He lay for a moment, soaking in the remaining sunlight seeping in over the horizon and through the glinting window. He closed his eyes, but couldn’t sleep. He felt the life within the walls pulsing through him, electric, as though the room itself were alive with past memories. The scenes rushed through his consciousness, playing out as though on a theatre screen every time he closed his eyes: happiness, desire, love, violence, confusion, and despair.

As the sunlight trickled in through the windowpane, he realized that the only escape was the storm. There was no other way to opt out of the game.



She looked around her and realized that she was in an eternal moment of sunset. Death was approaching, but it was still on the periphery, neither getting closer nor receding back into the forest. The sky above the treetops glowed a brilliant orange with the last rays of sunlight refracting over the horizon.

“In the end, it is inconsequential whether the balance is tallied.” She muttered the half-remembered words quietly to herself as she watched the world pass beneath her window.



She walked up beside him, once again at the window, and took his hand in hers. “I’ve missed you.” She said it softly, sweetly. It was a statement, not an accusation.

He turned to her and smiled. “I’ve missed you, too.”

They shared a moment of understanding, a moment beyond words, before it could dissolve from consciousness.

“I’m glad you waited for me.” He could see the tears forming in her eyes, a simple reminder of the lifetime they had shared together.

“I said I would.” He pulled her closer and directed her gaze towards the horizon. “After all, all that matters is this moment.”