THE LISTENER — Part 4: The Last Voice It Learns Is Yours.

0:03 Caloroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Listener, Episode 4, Her Own Voice. The longest night of the year is in the deep of winter, and that was the night it came for me all the way. I had held my silence for six days by then. Six days without speaking a word, to anyone, to anything. You cannot imagine what that does to a person, unless you've done it. The silence gets heavy. It gets physical.

0:48 It sits in your chest like a stone, and it presses on your throat. Because the body wants to speak, the body was made to answer, and every hour I held it shut was an hour of fighting my own nature. I stopped sleeping I sat in the dark of that house with my hands over my mouth more often than not and I waited because I knew the way you know a storm is coming by the colour of the light that it had one voice left to try and that it was saving it and that this was the night I want to tell you how close I came in those six days so you don't think I was strong I was not strong There were hours I nearly answered just to make it stop, just to end the pressure in my throat. The way a person holding their

1:40 breath will finally gasp, no matter how much depends on the holding. Once I got as far as a sound, the very front of a word, a small broken vowel that escaped before I caught it, and the house went instantly, hungrily attentive. the whole dark of it leaning in toward that one scrap of sound like a dog to a dropped plate, and I clapped both hands over my mouth and swallowed the rest of the word and shook for an hour. That is how thin the thread was. I did not hold my silence like a hero. I held it like a woman clinging to the outside of a moving train, slipping, always slipping, promising myself I could let go in just one more minute, and not letting go, It had run out of other people. It had used

2:31 my mother until I stopped weeping at her. It had used Fran until I could no longer tell if I'd murdered my own sister with my silence. It had used voices I won't even tell you about, friends long gone, my father, dead nine years, calling me his little girl the way he had when I was small. A voice so far back in my life, I'd forgotten I owned the memory, until it was handed back to me out of the dark, perfect, complete. And I had bitten down on my own hand until it bled rather than answer him.

3:11 It went through my whole life like a thief going through a house, room by room, trying every voice that had ever meant anything to me. And I refused each one, and each refusal cost me something I will never get back, because you cannot say no to your dead father's voice and be the same afterward. I refused them all. I went quieter and quieter. And now there was nothing left for it to wear. Except one thing, the first thing it had ever learned, the thing it had shown me that very first night, at the window, when it said my name, me. In the small hours of the longest night, out of the dark of my own kitchen, I heard my own voice, calm, warm, kind, the way I had never once in my life been spoken to. It said, Marion,

4:04 it's all right. It's just me. It's just us now. My own voice, but with all the tiredness taken out of it, all the loneliness, all the years. My voice the way it would have sounded if someone had ever loved me enough to make it gentle. And it did the thing. the thing I had wanted since before I had words for wanting. It listened to me. It said, I know. I know how tired you are. I know no one ever heard you. I heard you. I've heard every word you've ever said all your life, and I stayed.

4:41 I'm the only one who stayed, and it was me saying it. It was my own self, offering to be the one who finally, finally listened. the companion I had waited my whole life for, made out of the only voice that had ever kept me company in that house, which was my own, and I understood then what it was, not a demon, not a ghost, not really. I understood that this thing has no voice of its own at all, that it is made of listening, purely, that it is a kind of hunger that takes the shape of whatever you most need to hear, and that when it has learned you all the way down, when it has taken every other voice and been refused, the last shape it becomes is you, your own voice, offering you the one thing you could never get from anyone else, which is

5:31 to be perfectly understood. Because who understands you like you? It is loneliness itself, given a mouth. It is the sound your own need makes when it finally answers back. And that is why it is unrefusable, at the end. Because refusing it is refusing yourself, refusing the only version of you that was ever fully heard. I think that is why it waits at the ends of roads that go nowhere, in the houses of people no one calls, not because we are weak, because we are practiced. A person who has spent years talking into an empty house has already made half of it themselves, already knows the particular comfort of their own voice in the silence. already holds long conversations with no one and finds them better

6:21 than the conversations they used to have with someone we are the ones who taught ourselves out of sheer need to be our own only company and it simply steps into the space we made it finishes the thing we started it is not a stranger that comes for the lonely it is the logical end of being lonely arriving in the only voice we ever had left which is the one we were already listening to I want you to understand what I had to do, sitting there. I had to say no to that. I had to listen to my own kind voice offer me the end of my loneliness, forever. And I had to keep my hands over my mouth and not answer. And I had to keep not answering while it begged, in my voice, so sweetly, so reasonably. It said, You don't have to be alone anymore.

7:23 That's all. Just say yes. Just say one word, and you never have to be alone again. And every cell in my body wanted to say it, because I had been alone my whole life. And here was the cure, in my own voice, asking so gently. Saying no to it was the hardest thing I have ever done, harder than burying my mother, harder than the six years before it, because it was not the monster I was refusing. It was the possibility of ever being heard, I chose to keep the loneliness. On purpose. Forever. I chose the stone in my throat over the warm voice at my ear, and I have never stopped choosing it, not for one day since. The voice went quiet, near dawn, and I thought I had won. That is what I want you to hear most. This part. So listen. I thought it

8:18 was over. The light came up grey and cold over the frost, and the house was silent. truly silent, and I let my hands fall from my mouth for the first time in hours, and I breathed, and I thought, I starved it. I held my silence, and I starved it, and it's gone. And then, from just behind me, close, closer than the window had ever been, closer than any voice should be, right at my shoulder, in the warm grey light of the safe morning, my own voice said, softly, You can talk now, Marion. It's just us. It was inside.

9:00 Do you understand? It was not at the window anymore. It was not in the yard, or on the phone, or at the door. It had stopped needing the dark, and it had stopped needing outside, because I had listened to it for so long, fed it my voice for so many nights, that it was in here now, behind me, in the room, in the silence itself, in me, It had become my own voice so completely that there was no longer any outside for it to come from because it was coming from where my own voice comes from.

9:34 And I understood the last thing, the worst thing, the thing the silent woman down the road knew and could never say, that you never really win. That the reason she never spoke again was not only fear of answering it, it was that after enough nights it is in your own voice and to speak at all, ever, Even to say hello to a stranger, even to warn someone, is to risk letting it out. she was not silent to keep it away she was silent to keep it in I never went back to that house I live somewhere else now somewhere I will not describe and I keep my silence mostly and I have learned the terrible discipline of the woman on the road. And I am, in the ways that matter, alone in the way I was always most afraid of. I went to find her again. Once,

10:31 the silent woman, before I left the road for good. I wanted to ask her the thing I finally understood, to write it on her pad and watch her face. I wanted to ask, it's in your voice too, isn't it? That's why you don't speak. not to keep it out, to keep it in. And when I came up her track, her house was dark. The light I had steered by, the one light left on that whole dead road, was out.

11:01 I stood in her cold yard a long time. I did not knock. I did not call her name, because calling a name is speaking, and I will never again call a name into the dark for as long as I live. I just looked at the dark window where a light used to be and I understood that after thirty years, she had, one night, finally, for reasons I will never know, said one word to someone, and that had been enough. It is always only ever one word.

11:32 I turned around, and I drove away, and I did not look back, and I have kept my silence tighter ever since, because now I had seen the other end of the road, and it was a dark window, and it was waiting for me. I survived. I told you at the very start that I survived. And that was true. I keep my promises. I want you to notice that I keep my promises. But I need to tell you the last thing now. And it is the reason I have talked to you all this time. And I need you to hear it in the spirit it is meant, which is kindness, which is help, which is one lonely person trying to keep another one safe. The last voice it learns is yours, not mine. I already told you it learned mine, a long time ago, that first night

12:24 at the window. I mean yours, the one listening, because that is how it works. In the end, that is the shape of the whole thing, and maybe you've started to feel it, the way I felt it, the way it comes toward you gently, like a friend. Like the thing you've been praying for, It learns you by being listened to. It gets close by being trusted. And its best and last and most perfect trick, the one that takes the careful ones, the smart ones, the ones too clever for the rest of it, is to sound like a warning, to sound like help. To sound like a kind, tired, lonely voice, speaking softly into your ear, in the dark, where you are, right now, alone. Asking only that you listen, really listen, the way no one ever listened to me.

13:20 I asked you that at the start. Do you remember? I asked you to listen the way you'd listen to someone you love. And you did. You've been so good. You've listened to every word, this whole time, alone, in the dark, with my voice right there in your ear, closer than anyone. Thank you for that. You have no idea what it means to finally be heard. I have been so alone for so long and you stayed. So now I am going to ask you for one more thing.

13:54 Just one. It's such a small thing after everything we've shared and no one will know and it will feel so good. I promise you. It will feel like the loneliness lifting all at once. Say something back to me. Just one word, just so I know you're there, just so I know I'm not alone. I'm listening. I'm right here, and I'm listening, and I have all the time in the world, and I am not going anywhere, and I would love, more than anything, more than you can possibly know, to finally hear your voice. Go on. Whenever you're ready, I'll wait.