Voices

How much he relied upon voices to tell him what he wanted to know about somebody, to create an impression, a picture of them. Wasn't it remarkable how many kinds there were and how much they could suggest: how they could trick him too. He sat back and listened. He heard vacuous piercing outbursts of laughter, people who spoke much louder than they needed to, he could hear arrogant, stiff, smooth and prickly voices, alluring, miserable, embittered, confident, understated and dynamic ones too. He frowned to himself, it quickly turning to a coy smile of acknowledgement that, just as most people make judgements about others purely based upon their appearance - making connections or avoiding them upon this basis - he did exactly the same with voices. how a voice could seduce or turn him off, how a voice could convey beauty or disgust to him, how he could fall in love with a voice and imagine flying away together with its owner for ever. A voice could elicit his interest, excitement, suggest a possible connection, irritation - even the chance of an argument. There were some voices though that he found so unattractive, so grating, unpleasant even, that he would never want to get beyond to meet their unfortunate owner. He noticed how accents and dialects contributed to the enchantment of a voice - he preferred northern accents to southern. god, how terribly dismissive he could be of people with particular regional dialects and forgiving of others.
He recalled with some detachment the wisdom that "a picture saves a thousand words", was it not his own truth though that a word saves a thousand pictures. Surely, the mere utterance of a phrase invites attention, an interpretation, almost as though the voice were a window, behind which innocently lies that raw personality - gaping there yet unselfconscious in its nakedness for all to see.
His attention shifted again from his internal musings - those constant questions in his head - to the backdrop, the wash of sound that was the cafe's own collective voice. As it began to fill up and become more frantic, he wondered for a moment whether the cafe could eventually drown in its own noise, and if it could, whether he would drown along with it. He wondered what drowning in voices might be like, how those last moments would sound and if his final desperate gasps for silence would be heard, ignored or met with oblivious disinterest.
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