- “Are you a text or a call person?” is a binary question. I’m a voice note person. Give me all your meandering, your uncertainty, your riskiest humor. Give me the short story long, the one thing and the other thing I must know before I know the main thing. Serve it with a side of white noise—your fan whirring in the background, your dog barking in the distance, your tea coming to a boil. Give me your voice underscored by your life.
- I’ve been thinking about when I reach for the mic instead of the keyboard. It’s always when I’m brimming with emotion—anger, joy, or something in between. In those moments, a text feels too flat, too constrained to capture what I need to say. A voice note feels like the closest thing to intimacy—the equivalent of leaning in to tell my girlfriend something I’ve saved only for her, like the days we would huddle in the college canteen, like the times I’d whisper to my desk partner in between a lecture, like the days when we’d save the best stories for chai break on the stair landing of our office building. Now that my girls live across time zones, what else could bridge distance like this?
- Text messages demand that we fit ourselves into concise, well-punctuated versions. Calls require immediacy. Voice notes arrive with no such conditions. They are a medium to unravel, to test theories, to share gossip, to choke on your own laughter as you narrate a joke, to describe a strange encounter and invite analysis, to rant about that petty annoyance in vivid detail, to speak for a minute before arriving at any “point.” They are a medium for life’s most important business to unfold. They are an invitation to the world—I mean your friends—to theorize, analyze, vent, and speak with you. **A doorway not just to collectively experience but to collectively arrive at something.
** - Voice notes are modern handwritten letters in that they are most personal, most confessional, with the mistakes all there—the stream of consciousness, the scratched-out words, the stain of coffee. They arrive at one moment but are unfolded at another, then read, re-read, and every detail within them is responded to—the content, the tone, even the stain of coffee. “Did you record this voice note while peeing?” my friend asks. (It was the tap water.)
- Speaking without being heard in real time allows each thought to reach its natural end. Our words aren’t altered by the pressure to hold someone’s attention nor by someone’s unexpected reaction changing the course of what we were about to say. Voice notes, much like writing, give us the space to unfold our narrative.
- Perhaps that’s why we replay our voice notes—not to hear how we sound (always terrible) but to hear how we feel.
- I wait for voice notes because that’s where I see you. The way your smile creeps into your voice, how your consonants sharpen when you’re angry, how your voice shrivels when you’re upset yet willing to laugh about it, how your soft sighs at the end of a breathless sentence tell me you’re tired of life’s admin even as you say how much you’re looking forward to your time at home. No amount of punctuation can recreate the cadence of how you talk. And emojis can try, but they can’t fully capture the specific tenderness of a voice remembering something it loves.
