Featured in the 2016 Spring Issue of Rambunctious
By Emily Maar, ’16
Don’t tell me your name, don’t even say hello. I don’t want to know who you are, I don’t even want to be able to recognize your voice. Disguise your voice for me, keep me guessing, don’t let me know who you are. Only say every other word of what you want to say. Make it as hard as humanly possible for me to understand what you are telling me. Yell your message, whisper your message, speak it in a different language. Use different accents, use your friend, eat a bag of chips while you’re talking. Speak with improper grammar, don’t end your sentences, pronounce the words incorrectly. Just give me clues, leave me a hundred messages each with a single word, left for me to put together. Stop in the middle of your message, hang up like there was an emergency, leave me a message that never ends. Have a conversation with me like I’m there, keep my phone busy, never stop talking. Make it so difficult for me to listen to your message that I give up and never want to speak to you again. Make me so incredibly happy or so unbelievably sad, only to call me back and tell me everything you said was a lie. Let your dog call me, hand my number out on the street, let your message just be the sound of nails on a chalkboard. Don’t even say goodbye. Don’t say anything for a long time, and then hang up.