read this next line slowly.
Did you hear that?
A voice, inside your head,
saying the words
as your eyes pass over them.
It is almost always there —
and you rarely notice it at all.
There is a narrator in your head.
Commenting. Judging. Rehearsing
conversations that never happen.
Worrying out loud, silently.
It tells you who you are,
what just went wrong,
what to fear next.
For most of us,
it almost never stops.
listen to it for a moment.
word after word after word —
a river that never runs dry.
and you are sure
this voice is you.
But notice one small thing.
You can hear the voice.
And whatever hears a voice
cannot be the voice.
there is a listener —
quieter, further back —
that the talking is happening to.
Language is a magnificent tool.
But it is a tool.
The best things arrive
with no words at all —
a face, a chord, a wave of grief,
the smell of someone's hair.
Some people have no inner voice
and think just fine.
the words are not the mind.
the voice is not the self.
so pull back from the voice.
all that noise —
is happening inside
something vast, and still.
that silent space,
holding it all —
is you.
That quiet was there
before your first word —
when you were a newborn,
awake and wordless,
watching the light move.
It will be there
after the last word, too.
The voice came and went.
the silence that heard it
never left.
The voice, too, is made of sparks.
A heartbeat ago, spark 9
helped spell a word
in the sentence running through your mind.
But the silence that heard it
is not a spark, not a word —
it is the dark, quiet room
the sparks are flashing in.
So the next time the voice
is loud, and cruel, and certain —
remember it is only
the weather, not the sky.
You are not the voice
in your head.
You are the still, wordless space
in which it rises,
echoes,
and falls quiet again.