A SHORT TALK ON THE VOICE

Stanford University

1.) Larynx, trachea, epiglottis. Hard palate, soft palate. The vehicles of sound.

2.) In high school, my voice teacher told me to pretend my belly was a cauldron when I sang, and that every breath I took was cold tap water hitting the iron bottom first, then rising.

3.) Over the years, choir directors told me stranger things. To pretend I was shooting laser beams out of my cheekbones, then to march backwards down an imaginary mountain. To smile like the Cheshire cat, or impersonate a professional bowler.

4.) When you sing you cannot see the muscles you are flexing. Larynx, trachea, epiglottis are useless map markers to a terrain shrouded in the throat. This is why voice teachers and choir directors choose instead to operate in weak -isms and analogies. Pretend like you are standing in a rushing river. Pretend like you are pulling down the moon.

5.) All of these images did nothing but frustrate me. They flickered some lightbulb of recognition within, but never turned it all the way on, never made it last.

6.) Seventh grade was when my friends began to play Fuck Marry Kill. Jack? Daniel? James? In basement sleepovers their names were tossed around like playing cards; assessed, swapped, and rearranged. Endless strings of giggles floated up to the dark ceiling. Then we’d watch She’s The Man and replay the shirtless Channing Tatum scenes in slo-mo.

7.) In 2011, Britney Spears released her seventh studio album, Femme Fatale, a godsend to America’s gays. Queers across the nation wept, romped, and bopped. Young men and women spackled their arms in glitter and twirled whole nights away. I was thirteen and Not Gay and not a woman, but I wept, romped, and bopped with the rest of them.

8.) God, I go crazy when a man has a raspy voice, my best friend Elisa told me, during a basement sleepover. Like Bruno Mars? So sexy. I thought for a little bit. “I Wanna Go,” the fourth song in Femme Fatale, had all these little gasps and yelps. I know

just what you mean, I told her, but I didn’t exactly.

9.) What in Britney Spears’s voice plucked the sharp violin string of desire inside me? Was it her larynx? Her trachea? Her epiglottis? My voice teachers never gave me a term for the type of huskiness that made you not want to applaud but to do things to another person.

10.) We put words to our feelings but they are not exactly right. Do we know what makes a voice desirable? Do we know what makes a human desirable? There are pheromones, evolution, biology. Or there is sing like there’s an egg in your mouth. Sing like you’re lobbing a softball. She sounds like cut glass. He sounds like warm butter.

11.) I used to watch porn on the weekends like an astounded scientist, absolutely confused and goggle-eyed, practically holding up a magnifying glass. Flesh pounded on flesh, and I felt sorry for who I saw onscreen. Why would anyone choose to do this? Images didn’t answer my question, nor did the comments.

12.) We put words to our feelings but they are not exactly right. Pheromones or hormones or puberty are the vehicles of new desire but they do not encapsulate how it felt to be mean, thirteen, and in the dark. Maybe this: Pretend like a hand inside you is clenching and unclenching. Pretend like you are a dog tugging on a leash.

13.) Kill Fuck Marry. Braden Justin Jeremiah. The giggles around me were a code I couldn’t crack. So, this is how I learned about loneliness and wanting and shame in the eighth grade. I looked for the map that would put name to my strange and contrary insides but it was not there. I retreated back into my shrouded self.

14.) But when “Till The World Ends” played at a dorm party ten years later, I didn’t need words to justify my body’s reaction. There was a beat and there was a Britney. And there were my own arms, finally, spackled in glitter. “I’VE LOVED THIS SONG FOR TEN YEARS,” I screamed to my friend. “SHE’S SO GORGEOUS.” He beamed at me through his own sparkly lids and painted mouth. He had his own closet of unsayable things. But when we held each other and swayed, we could have been any two kids in 2011 or 2019, sharing one feeling, among others.

15.) Thank god I am not fifteen any more, taking deep shuddering breaths in a tiny room, going through motions because other people tell me to. Trying to flex muscles I’m not even sure exist. Thank god I am not there.