Pearls Strung on an Invisible Thread
Memory is never singular—it is voice, body, scent, and sound.
I remember the sound of my sister's voice before the accident. I remember her smells — the biting coolness of nail polish remover, its medicinal edge, mixed with the creamy floral of her Pantene shampoo, like lilies blended with roses kissed by a vanilla bean.
The tone, pitch, rhythm, and breath of a voice, the smell of a person; those recollections pull me deep into memory like nothing else. Smells and sounds tether remembrance differently from language and images. They bypass analysis, slip under thought, and pierce the body.
Her voice had the bright, lilting lift of youth — high and light, like a melody that catches the ear and refuses to let go. There was a crystalline sweetness to it, almost like spun sugar dissolving in the air. Yet it wasn’t fragile; beneath the delicate tone lived composure, a practiced ease that seemed older than her years. When she spoke, her words tumbled out with silken clarity, each syllable carefully shaped, like pearls strung on an invisible thread.
Her laughter — quick, chiming, effortless — made any room feel warmer. And yet, in her quieter tones, her voice carried subtle sophistication, gracefulness that suggested she had studied the rhythms of adult speech and made them her own.
Reading my first novel, A Map of Everything, for its audiobook in a recording studio, I found and gave voice to parts I’d completely forgotten. In that booth, lines I had once written but no longer remembered startled me awake, like a letter sent decades ago and only now opened. In those forgotten words, my sister returned — not in flesh but in resonance. I remembered the stories she spun at night in our shared room, her disembodied voice embracing me in the dark.
Before her accident, she was a weaver of worlds. Lying in bed, I would whisper that I couldn’t sleep, and her reply would come: Do you want to hear a story? My eager Yes, please! would rise into the quiet, and I’d settle against my pillow, gazing at the moon above the trees outside our window. Its pale light poured across the sill, branches swaying shadows in the night breeze. From within that glow, her voice would lift — high and sweet — gathering up the moonlight and making it hers.
She summoned whole worlds from nothing, populating them with characters who often felt like extensions of us. And always, there was a little girl who looked very much like me. She would be the one to learn the lesson: to share, to forgive, to be brave. My sister taught me morality before I had the words for it, smuggling wisdom through the enchantment of stories.
If only I had a recording of those tales. If only I had her voice.
Memory, of course, is its own fragile recording. I admire Kazim Ali’s work — spanning poetry, prose, and meditation — that explores memory as a layered, destabilizing force. For him, memory is not merely recall but an unstable terrain: at once root and rupture, a site of identity and estrangement. His writing turns over memory as moral burden, as intergenerational echo, as existential reflection, as the negotiation of belonging.
In his poem Solace, memory becomes a dialogue with mortality, “In Winnipeg there is a gravestone marked with my name / in which lies a man whose silhouette I see in the mirror every morning.”
Here, memory entwines self-perception with ancestral inheritance, the living confronted by the shadow of the dead. Memory becomes less about what I recall than about what recalls me — the way blood, name, and story pull the present into dialogue with the absent. Memory is parts interwoven, voice, translation, as well as associations.
Last week, I met a woman who claims to remember her existence before she was born. She spoke of a vivid elsewhere she inhabited before arriving in her body. Because of this, she does not fear death. She remembers where she came from and believes she will return there. Her life is laced with a homesickness for that place, a longing not to escape the world but to return to a beloved origin.
Mainstream neuroscience generally holds that episodic memory requires a developed hippocampus, which does not fully mature until after birth. And yet, fetuses demonstrate forms of implicit memory: they recognize the mother’s voice, familiar melodies, even certain tastes after birth. Perhaps memory is not only about cognitive recall but also about somatic imprint, about the ways cells and nerves remember patterns of vibration.
This is why I sang to my son from the time he was the size of a lima bean in my womb until the day he was born and beyond. Some researchers suggest that early experiences leave imprints that may later surface as “memories” or intuitions. I wanted my voice, and that song, to weave itself into his being — to steady him in times of unease, to bring him peace throughout his life, and perhaps even into his dying journey.
What is a mother’s voice if not a rope tied between worlds? Breath made vibration, vibration became comfort, comfort embedded itself in memories that may outlast conscious thought.
Recently, I found a trove of writings from twenty years ago. There were short stories, starts of stories, ideas, poems. There was even a full novel manuscript I forgot I wrote. Reading through those pages felt like eavesdropping on a stranger who shared my name. The voice was mine and not mine — youthful, urgent, sometimes reckless, always hungry to say something true.
It made me nostalgic for the writer I once was, the young woman unafraid to write without censorship, without knowing whether anyone would ever read the words. The voice of that girl still lingers in me, though it sometimes feels like a ghost’s whisper. Her memory is not stored in my hippocampus alone; it surfaces in my fingertips as they find their way across a keyboard, in my breath as I shape a sentence aloud.
Memory, then, is never singular. It is voice, body, scent, and sound. It is the story told by another in the dark. It is the gravestone carrying your name. It is the mother’s song carried in blood. It is the forgotten manuscript that turns up one day hidden on a server, insisting you are not finished telling that story, using your voice.
If only I had my sister’s voice on tape. Perhaps what remains is more elemental. Her voice lives in the rhythm of my own when I read aloud. It lives in the stories I tell my son at night, when he says he cannot sleep and I ask, Do you want to hear a story? It lives in the way I carry memory — not as static recall, but as breath moving forward.
