“The Wind Forgot My Voice”

“The Wind Forgot My Voice”

By [Ali rehman]

The day my voice disappeared, the world grew unbearably quiet.

It wasn’t the silence of peace — it was the silence of being unheard. I opened my mouth, and though I felt the shape of words forming, nothing came out. Not even a whisper. The doctor called it “psychogenic aphonia,” but what could medicine know of heartbreak carved from words that never reached their destination?

I had spent my life as a poet, living between pages and pauses, whispering my feelings into the world. Now, all I could do was watch the wind move the curtains and wonder if it could hear the poems I still held inside.

For weeks, I wrote in notebooks, on fogged windows, on the backs of envelopes that would never be mailed. But words trapped on paper felt lifeless — bones without breath. One evening, standing on the balcony, I closed my eyes and mouthed a single line I’d written years ago:

“If the sky ever listens, tell it I’m still waiting.”

The wind brushed past me then — soft, deliberate, like the fingers of a friend remembering your face. And for the first time, I felt the air respond, not in sound, but in movement. The curtains fluttered. The leaves below swayed, repeating the rhythm of my silent words.

That night, I decided to teach the wind how to speak.

At first, it was only a game — a lonely woman’s way of pretending she still had a voice. I began to write my poems on thin scraps of paper and let the wind carry them away from my hands. I would stand barefoot on the balcony, whispering soundless words as the paper slipped into the night air.

The next morning, I’d find the same words etched into unlikely places — a line of my poem written in the dust on my windowpane, another pressed faintly into the soil beneath the jasmine plant, another traced by fallen leaves.

Coincidence, I thought. Until one day, I found a full poem written in condensation on the bathroom mirror:

“Your silence is louder than storms.

I have carried your voice across mountains,

but it forgets itself when it returns home.”

I hadn’t written that.

The wind began to visit more often after that.

Some nights it came like a child — playful, swirling around my hair, tugging at my curtains. Other nights, it was sorrowful, humming through the cracks in the walls as if trying to sing. I would sit by the window, and it would answer me in touches, in whispers that didn’t need sound.

I started writing with it. I’d write half a line and leave it by the open window. By morning, the other half would appear, written by invisible fingers in dust, in pollen, in dew. My notebook filled with strange collaborations — poems that were not entirely mine.

But the more we wrote together, the more I began to lose myself.

The wind carried my words farther than I ever could. My poems began appearing in places I’d never been — scrawled on café napkins, painted on sidewalks, murmured by strangers on park benches. People began quoting me online, calling me “The Silent Poet.”

I should’ve felt proud. Instead, I felt hollow. The wind had learned my language — and was now speaking it better than I ever could.

One night, during a storm, I woke to find my window wide open. Papers flew around the room like frightened birds. I rushed to close it, but the wind held me back. It pressed against me, not violently, but desperately, as if begging me to stay.

I mouthed the words, “What do you want?”

And for the first time, I heard it. Not in my ears, but inside my bones.

“To remember your voice.”

The words weren’t mine — but they were familiar. The wind’s voice sounded like the echo of something I’d once said, long ago, in anger. And suddenly, I remembered.

The last night I had spoken aloud was the night I lost the person I loved most. We had argued until the rain drowned our words. I had shouted, “I wish the wind would take my voice, so you’d finally listen!”

And it did.

The realization broke something open inside me. I fell to my knees as tears mixed with rain and thunder. “You took it,” I tried to say, though no sound came out. “You took my voice.”

The wind circled me, softer now, trembling like a guilty child.

“I did,” it murmured in the rustle of trees. “You asked me to.”

Lightning flashed across the sky — and for the briefest second, I saw it. A shape in the storm, human and endless, made of air and memory. The wind’s face — my voice made visible.

“I kept it safe,” it whispered. “But now it’s forgetting.”

The air around me trembled. The room grew colder. I realized that if the wind forgot my voice completely, it would take everything — my poems, my name, the part of me that still spoke to the world.

So I did the only thing I could. I pressed my hands to the window frame and mouthed the words I had once given away:

“Listen.”

And for the first time in months, a sound escaped me — faint, cracked, but real. The wind stopped. The world held its breath.

“I am listening,” it answered.

Since that night, I speak again — not often, and not loudly. My voice is softer now, as if it still carries the echo of the wind inside it.

Sometimes, when I read my poems aloud, the air in the room shifts, and a breeze brushes the edge of each word, like a hand guiding them into the world.

And I know it remembers me still — the wind that once stole my voice, and then taught me how to use it again.