I wouldn’t know her now; no, not with these hands. Not these pudgy grubby hands, nails ragged with digging in the garden without gloves. These are not her small hands, her restless hands. When she talked her hands were never still. They’d distract me with their fluttering, until I’d grab them, and hold them, and make her talk to me without moving. Which she couldn’t. And so she’d pull away.
I would not recognize her so grounded. I knew her when her head was in the clouds. When did she has settle onto earth? become so grave with the weight of it?
No, I would not know her. Except for her voice. I recognized it right away. When I listen to her voice I can see her dark eyes darting to the side, as if she were listening to someone in the shadows. And perhaps she was. She always did talk about the voices in her head. Those people, her people, who inhabited a dimension just a half-second off from ours. People she glimpsed flickering in the shadows. They spoke to her. Or was it through her? It was hard to get a fix on her. Her face was always changing. She was a multitude.
Now whose voice whispers from the shadows?