On Sylvia Plath

Her voice floats out through the speakers and she does not sound how I imagined she would. She sounds like a parakeet. She sounds cheerful, even. I imagine her nose by the way she speaks, all I can think of is the shape of her nose. The sound of her voice is the shape of a nose or she speaks through her nose. The interviewer asks his questions slowly and his voice is like a cup of half-cold coffee or a dark bed sheet. The orange cat wishes I would scratch her head. I always feel guilty when they ask to be pet, like they shouldn't have to ask in the first place since I'm the only one that keeps them here. But the orange one always wants me to scratch her head when I am at the green desk. She likes the sound of typing. Maybe when she hears my hands typing all she can think about is what the typing sound would feel like behind her ears, like me with the interview and the sound of her nose. The grey cat comes to see me when I lie down on my lumpy bed and it is usually much easier to be courteous with her. The whole time i was listening to her voice and the man asking questions, I was trying to write down my dream. I have been trying to document all of my dreams and mark them so that one day I will have the most marvelous collection of my dreams and everything will all of a sudden make sense. Maybe I will find how I've been telling the future all the time for everyone, and they'll all be marked by date so that no one can say I'm just making things up now in my old age. But when I heard her voice I couldn't remember any of the dream anymore. I couldn't get past the first sentence and even after In turned the interview off I couldn't remember a thing. It had been a long stringy dream, marvelously odd and complex. I had been excitedto document it but now I haven't even a sketch of it. The trick is to tell someone out loud about it if you aren't going to write it down right away but I mucked it up and it was all because of that nose and that cold coffee voice too asking which foot she leaned her weight on as she stretched across the Atlantic. It was a horrible metaphor but she eventually said that she talked like an American and all I could think was that she talked like a nose even when she was bringing up torture and her voice was not at all what I had pictured it being.