Soap Box Corner

I miss my daughter’s voice. Not simply the sound of it, though that too feels like a haunting absence, but the life it carried, the laughter, the curiosity, the small discoveries she once poured into words as if the world were too vast to hold inside. Now it comes to me only in fragments, a quiet “yes,” a clipped response, a murmur that acknowledges my presence but no longer invites me in. What once was a steady current of conversation has narrowed to a trickle.

It has reached a point where trying to have these talks feels as though I am a bother. When I ask about her day, or suggest a simple outing like a train trip, her responses are always brief, detached, lacking the curiosity or warmth they once carried. I hear her voice sometimes from the other room, alive and unguarded in its warmth, speaking to her mother. It drifts through the walls like a reminder of something I’ve lost but cannot stop longing for. I strain toward it, not with ears alone but with the ache of memory, recalling the way she once laughed without hesitation, her silly humor filling the air like sunlight. I wonder if she knows how much I hunger for even the smallest piece of that again, a story, a thought, a question meant only for me.

There is a grief in silence, a distance that feels heavier than words can carry. It is not that I do not love her still, my love is unbroken, unshaken, but that I no longer know her as I once did. I live now in the absence of that knowing, in the hollow where her voice used to be.

I tell myself it is a season, that perhaps one day she will turn to me again, not out of duty but out of desire. That we will sit together and let the hours pass in conversation about nothing and everything, the way we once did. Until then, I find myself clinging to echoes, to the memory of her voice, beautiful, bright, imperfect, alive.

I miss my daughter’s voice. I miss her presence carried through sound. I miss the way it reminded me of who we were together, and who I still hope we might be again.