Lita lived in a small purple house at the top of the hill. Not the mythical kind of hill that you can climb to the top of with just a bit of exertion. This hill was the kind that you start at the bottom of with energy and excitement, balancing your bike and eyeing the top. You start up the hill, with its deceptively gentle incline, pumping your pedals. Your bike makes its way up without you even working up a sweat. You look only at your handlebars, so as not to feel stressed by the length of hill left to go, but inside you feel confident that this minor hill will soon be behind you. But the pumping continues. The gentle incline continues and your body starts working harder and harder because of the lack of rest. Round and round your legs work, your thigh muscles tense up. Your heart starts pounding harder; still, eyes looking down, you know you're almost at the top. You will win. Further pumping and revolutions and a peek ahead reveals that there is still far more hill ahead than behind.
That's the hill that Lita had bought her new two-room house on.
Inside the house there was a room for sitting, cooking and eating and a room for sleeping. The basement was dirt-floored, cavernous and unused. Curtains were yet to be hung and cabinets yet to be filled. The furniture consisted of a steady, oval dining room table with four chairs, a threadbare couch and a large, wooden rocking chair. In the bedroom was a queen-sized bed and a big-enough bureau.
The excuse Lita used to explain to her friends and family why she was moving was that she wanted to write. She wanted to try to write a novel or poetry or anything. In reality, though, she didn't care so much about the writing. It was the voices that moved her.
The voices started as a whisper, like the leaves on the tips of the trees rustling in the wind. Lita would sit at the dining room table with her papers laid out on the table around her, dipping her pen into the ink and writing down the whispers, word after word after word, slowly filling up page after page with the rustling. As she finished a page she'd place it aside on the table.
As the voices circled louder, Lita worked faster, listening and scribbling, dipping, listening and scribbling. Scribbling, dipping, listening, sighing and breathing. Page after page completed was piled on the rest. As long as the voices continued she wrote down their thoughts and feelings and ideas and piled up the sheets.
When her fingers ached and felt sore from gripping the stylus and her eyes were rimmed with that sore, fuzzy feeling she drew all the pages together into one pile and picked them up and brought them over to her rocking chair.
Rocking on the chair, Lita skimmed each page and, annoyed, tossed each into the fireplace and watched the edges curl, shrivel and turn to smoke. One by one she fluttered the pages into the fire and watched them burn. The voices were not there. The information she's seeking is not apparent.
Writing down the voices helped her try to understand them. She wanted to be close to them. She needed to connect to them or they were just spirits floating around in the ether making her feel untethered and unconnected. She tried to pull them from where their voices streamed down from the universe. The answers to her fulfillment lay in their words, she knew it. She just needed to figure out what they were saying and why. The meaning lay deep within their utterances and she needed to uncover the message that they'd been whispering to her since her earliest memories.
Years before, Lita had been with her friends and family. Some days they all got together in big living rooms decorated with candles and shiny table decorations. They'd surround themselves with dishes of chicken sautéed in apricots, potatoes baked with herbs, beef braised with onions, rice studded with nuts, stewed figs, fried fish, chocolate candies, cut out cookies, fluffy chiffon cakes and more. They would sit around and talk about their children and jobs and frustrations of the moment.
Other days she'd make dinner, a simple pan of chicken with biscuits or lasagna or fish with rice or something else for her children and they'd sit and talk about school and desires. Afterwards they'd sit on the couch and watch television together. She'd talk on the phone to her friends about everything in the world.
The kids grew and the space around her, the pulsing light and air space around her, grew louder and pulsed more intensely. She couldn't find anyone who could get through it and touch her and connect with her on the deepest level.
The whispers found her at night when she had finished kissing the last child, when she was wiping the counters clean from dinner. When she was waiting in traffic, when an appointment was cancelled, when she had no errands to run in her free time between work and home, the voices crept up on her. In all the small spaces between the bricks of routine in her life, the voices whispered. They struggled through those tiny spaces to rumble louder and louder, squeezing and fighting themselves through minute spaces of betweeness.
So she moved up to the top of the hill. Clearly, she thought, they couldn't follow her there. In her cabin, though, there was nothing but the voices. Her kids had grown and moved into their own homes, her husband and family drifted away, pursing their own answers to voices. Lita was alone in her cabin with her paper and pen and the words, the insistent demands of the voices.
The voices whisper of clean and polished wood coffee tables, lipstick that stays shiny all day, boxed dinners that make angels out of teenagers, beers that make men instantly irresistible, laundry detergent that makes the weather beautiful, soft drinks that make your kids smarter and on and on.
Lita's activity works to quell the continuous droning in her head. Without the television or radio she doesn't hear such insistence from anywhere outside herself, but she can't seem to shut it out of her head. The emptiness in her brain is filled with the messages and in its place, the emptiness, which should be peace, moves down into her body and aches. She feels such an aching emptiness in her body.
She doesn't have the special strong deodorant or the gatherings of thronging, blond friends to crowd around her as she sips her beer or the natural feeling hair product that makes her hair shinier and strong. The pounding emptiness from such lack makes her body echo even louder.
Somehow she can peek out through the curtain in her head and see that there is something else out there. It doesn't have to be this way. She has tried every method to be free of it, but the empty feeling in her body continues to grow. She writes to find the answer. How does she escape?
The voices, she realizes, are the source of the answer. She feels like she's getting closer to the source now. She keeps writing and writing. She's sure that if she can just capture all the thoughts in her head that some of them will be the voice that's talked to her since childhood. Thoughts appear and disappear, memories too. As she writes she is five years old again lying in the grass in her yard. She feels the gentle blade pricks of the grass. They tickle her legs and arms. The dirt smells so full and as she lies giggling, trying to be quiet so her seeker doesn't notice her, she hears the voice, gently calling, gently beckoning. Lita holds her breath for an instant attending to the voice instead of the game. She hears her name and feels a pull. "Found ya!" squeals Matthew, her next-door neighbor. Lita is up in a flash giggling and wrestling; the voice is quiet.
She knows there are ways to block the voices, the games and work and certainly small children, but no matter what she tries they come back to haunt her and remind her that something is missing and that she needs to find the answer instead of trying to drown out the voices.
The house helps. Writing seems to help empty the cacophony in her head a bit every day. She continues to search the words for the meaning behind her existence, but they are just so many words, nothing more. Each day burning the pages by the fire, though, seems to quiet another trickle of voices, but perhaps that is just her imagination. The noise and memories, the smells and past seemed to be the source of the answer, but none of it rewards. Instead, the answer seems to drift further and further away. In it's place ashes of placidity flutter to rest inside of her. The drive to figure it out diminishes almost imperceptibly day by day, week by week and month by month. Lita becomes more full of calm than voices and struggle.
Perhaps there is no answer so much as the lack of struggle, the lack of striving and needing to find an answer. So many voices over the course of a lifetime. There were fewer and fewer papers to burn now every night. Lita still took down the voices whisperings, but they came neither as quickly or as strongly as they used to. Tonight she wrote until her eye lids drooped then moved to the rocking chair to read, no longer expecting to find what she was looking for, and fell asleep.
