Preservation in cans.
Well-loved soup.
Apocalypses big and small.
I stopped listening to my mother’s voicemail three months after she died. Not because I had moved on (I hadn’t), but because I was starting to forget which laugh was hers.
In the supermarket, I would hear someone’s mother behind me, that particular pitch of affection mixed with exasperation, and I would turn around. Always the wrong woman, of course. Always a different timbre, a different rhythm, in hindsight.
Each time, the real sound in my memory grew a little fainter, overwritten by these false versions. But I couldn’t stop going to the supermarket, could I? I couldn’t plug my ears in public, like a child, to stop myself from hearing the laughter of stranger-women and thinking of my mother.
So, I stopped listening to the voicemail. I thought if I preserved her voice by shielding it from comparison, it would stay pure—like canned peaches that might last through the next apocalypse if only you don’t keep unscrewing the lid to check if they’ve spoiled.
The message in the voicemail itself was nothing.
“Hi, honey. Just calling to see how you’re doing. Call me back when you get a chance.”
Nine seconds. I had listened to it so many times in the first weeks, I had memorized every breath, every slight rasp where her throat caught on the “h” in the word “honey.” I could recite it.
But reciting isn’t the same as hearing.
My brother said he never saved any voicemails. He said it like a confession, one afternoon when we were sorting through her things.
The guilt on his face made me feel superior at first. I had the voicemail. I had insurance. But then he said something that deflated me:
“I can still hear her, though. Every time I fuck something up, I hear exactly how she’d laugh about it.”
At six months, I realized I couldn’t remember her voice at all anymore unless I relied on my insurance. Without such external proof, all I heard in my head was just an approximation, like a bowl of watered-down soup. The general idea was there, the overall melody. But the actual sound, that precise frequency that made her voice hers and no one else’s, had evaporated.
Stealthily, unwillingly, I would press Play on the voicemail that I had supposedly stopped listening to, and I thought, Yes, that’s it. I knew that.
But the moment it ended, the certainty left too.
I started rationing the voicemail. Once a week, then once a month. Add more water to the soup. Let it be infinite!
But the worst part wasn’t the forgetting itself. It was realizing that the voicemail had become a lie. I had preserved the recording, but in doing so, I had stopped preserving the living memory. I had traded the messy, embodied experience of her voice for one sterile nine-second artifact. And now, that artifact was all I had. The rest had already gone. The way her voice changed when she was tired, when she was annoyed, when she was proud—gone.
My brother was right. He had never tried to hold on, and somehow he still had more than I did.
I deleted the voicemail last month. Not out of fear or frustration, but in something like understanding. I knew that if I kept it much longer, I’d start to hate it, and worse—hate myself. I would become a junkie, each listen making me more desperate for the thing that was already gone.
Now, when I try to remember her voice, I get only the vaguest impression. Something warm. Something a little raspy. Something that probably sounds a lot like my voice, although I can’t be certain.
Sometimes when I’m talking on the phone, I wonder if someone will need to remember my voice someday. Will they save a voicemail, ration it, and eventually let it go? I wonder if I’ll blur into an approximation, too, until I’m just a warm impression, a bowl of soup—watered-down but well-loved nonetheless. Stirred and reheated so many times through apocalypses big and small, the individual flavors have blurred into pure warmth.
I wonder if that’s what love is: warmth, not dependent on specifics.