Inadvertent Utterances of Sound (Causes of and Places Occurred)
By Rebecca Bernard
Last night, lying in bed for the third night in a row where I cannot fall asleep and in frustration the grunt escapes my lips, and I realize I’m an animal body with animal instincts. Robert, lying next to me, does not register my sound.
In the ocean, on the beach, in dreams, on mountains, at a bar by myself my elbows on the wood, my brain emits a hum. A spark. I yelp.
Oof. I say it, and then I look around. No one is ever listening. Shame manifests regardless.
Tamielle Horn asking me whether or not I shaved my legs in seventh grade. Later, asking my mom, expecting her to be angry and instead it was as if she’d been expecting me to become aware of this female body I was inhabiting.
That late night text or email or Facebook message I sent him last night or five years ago or when I was 18 or 25 or 32 and he never responded.
In the evening, walking the dog with Robert, I recall the conversation with my student who does not believe in the experiences of others. Does not believe Ross Gay really experienced the racism of his youth. “It’s not as bad as all that.”
In public at the grocery store near the popsicles, cold air erecting all my hairs. A loud exhale, unthinking.
Maybe your name was Billy, I cannot remember. Friend of a friend’s boyfriend, we met late at the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint and kissed outside against the doors. I went back to your apartment, but because I liked you, I didn’t want to have sex. Again and again I moved your hand away and I tried to make myself speak up, but I didn’t have the words. We fell asleep and I slipped away the next morning. I sent you a message on Myspace, trying to explain but without explaining anything. I like you. But that wasn’t what I said. I’m sorry for being weird, I say. You don’t respond.
On the streets of Brooklyn, I groan.
In class, in front of my peers. I open my mouth and say nothing.
That time working as a production assistant on the overnight film shoot in Connecticut and the old, cheap white tennis shoes I was wearing got wet and stunk so badly that everyone could smell something awful, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell the stranger I was sharing a room with that it was my shoes that were causing the stink we could not identify. I poured hand soap on them in the bathroom. Nothing worked.
Alone in the house, a grunt, and I wonder if it’s a living thing. A little ghost of feeling let out to haunt the room, the self, the ongoing present tense of living.
At Shangri-la in Austin, drunk, desperate for touch, trying to convince the online-poker-playing roommate of Andy, a bartender I worked with, to sleep with me and him saying no, and finding another warm body twenty minutes later, a man with a boy’s name, Matty, who called the day after we met, and despite his kindness, a full body shudder.
The time I wore an afro wig in my early twenties for Halloween, and the shame, the shame I did not feel then, but I cannot rid myself of now.
Remembering all of the misspoken words, the stories gone nowhere, the failed attempts at love, at personhood again and again like hail. Like dents of living. Like the sound of.
Inside my organs. My heart. My liver. My mind. How tenuous our humanity, how easily we fail ourselves, one another, Oh god. I am so sorry. I am—
We are fifteen, seventeen, my keys locked in the car outside the diner we drove forty minutes to get to through the leaves and trees and countryside and my father coming to rescue us and he is not angry, somehow, and we are back at my house and alone in the carpeted study you take me in your arms we fall to the floor and you tell me you love me, you love me, and I say it too, I say it, I love you, too because all week it has been bubbling forth, it has been any moment an inadvertent declaration of what’s true.
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About Rebecca Bernard
Bernard is a teaching fellow in the doctoral program at the University of North Texas where she serves as Production Editor for the American Literary Review. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Pleiades, Southwest Review, Witness, and elsewhere. Her work received notable mention in the Best American Short Stories of 2018.
You can also find this essay in issue 39.2 along with many other wonderful pieces!
You can follow Rebecca on Twitter with the handle @reebeckss, on Instagram @ohheyrebecca, and on Facebook. You can also visit her website to find more of Rebecca’s amazing work!