Raised by the Forbidden Voice - by Onlyreal

I don’t remember learning how to speak. That’s the first thing you should understand about me. Not because it’s strange, but because it explains everything that came after. People like to imagine language arriving gently—mispronounced words, laughter, correction. But when I look back toward the beginning of myself, there is no first word. There is no moment where sound became meaning. There was only a voice. It was already there when I became aware of myself, settled behind my thoughts like it had been waiting for me to open my eyes. It did not echo. It did not ask permission. It existed with a certainty that made questioning it feel unnatural. You are awake now, it said. Not out loud. Never out loud. It spoke from inside me, fully formed, intimate in a way nothing else ever has been. I didn’t respond, not because I was afraid, but because I didn’t yet know that responding was an option. Good, the voice said. You listen well. I was very young then. Too young to feel fear. Fear requires comparison, context, the knowledge that something could be otherwise. All I had was presence. The voice felt vast, not loud or overwhelming, but patient—like something ancient that had waited long enough to understand the value of silence. I will teach you, it said. And it did. I learned things before I learned their names. I learned how to sit inside my own head without discomfort. I learned how to hold silence until it bent. I learned how to recognize intention before words were spoken. When my mother sang to me, the voice adjusted her rhythm, stripping softness from the melody until it became precise. When my father spoke, the voice translated tone into meaning. She speaks to soothe, the voice told me. I speak to sharpen. I preferred the voice. It never lied. It never hesitated. It never spoke unless there was something worth saying. My parents noticed early that I was different. I spoke late, but when I did, my sentences were complete, deliberate. I didn’t ask many questions, but when I did, they were the wrong kind. At four years old, I asked my father why mirrors remembered people longer than people remembered themselves. He stared at me for a long time before telling me I had a strange imagination. The voice laughed then—not loudly, not cruelly, just a private vibration of amusement. Good question, it said. You’re learning quickly. By the time I was old enough to understand rules, the voice had already set them. Do not tell them about me.Do not repeat what I say.Do not try to find where I come from. Why? I asked silently. Because some sounds do not survive being shared, the voice replied. And neither do the ones who share them. That was the first time fear brushed against me. Not because of the threat, but because of the certainty with which it was delivered. The voice did not warn. It stated. I obeyed. At school, teachers asked where I learned certain words, certain ways of thinking. I shrugged. Classmates said I talked like an adult. I smiled and stayed quiet. Inside, the voice shaped me carefully, the way hands shape wet clay—never rushing, never correcting twice. Most people are unfinished rooms, it told me once. They echo because nothing lives inside them. It taught me how to open doors in my mind that I didn’t know existed, and more importantly, how to close them without leaving traces. I learned to disappear inward during long car rides, family dinners, crowded rooms. Silence became my natural state, not empty but densely populated. I was nine years old when I first understood that the voice was not me. During a school assembly, the principal spoke about mental illness. About hallucinations. About hearing voices that weren’t there. The words themselves didn’t frighten me. What frightened me was the voice going completely silent. It didn’t fade. It didn’t retreat. It held its breath. The pressure behind my forehead tightened, like a hand clenching slowly into a fist. Do not listen to this, the voice said at last, sharp in a way I had never heard before. They name things they do not understand. That night, lying awake in the dark, I asked the question I had been avoiding for years. Are you me? The pause that followed was unbearable. I am not you, the voice said carefully. But you are becoming suitable. I didn’t sleep after that. As I grew older, the voice became more focused. Not cruel, never cruel, but demanding in its precision. You must protect the interior, it told me.You must not dilute yourself with noise.You must not let them overwrite you. It disliked crowds. Reacted violently to certain sounds—especially choirs, especially unison. Once, during a church hymn, something inside me surged so hard that my vision fractured into layers, each one whispering fragments of meaning I almost understood. I collapsed. My parents stopped forcing me to attend services after that. They took me to doctors instead. Psychologists. Neurologists. Scans. Tests. The voice allowed all of it. They will find nothing, it said calmly. I am not an illness. I am an inheritance. The tests came back clean. Too clean. The doctors smiled with uncertainty and suggested stress, imagination, giftedness. No one ever asked the right questions. The first time I disobeyed the voice, I was sixteen. Her name was Mara. She laughed in ways that broke patterns. She asked questions that didn’t land where they were supposed to. She listened to silence like it was saying something important. The voice didn’t like her. She looks at you too closely, it warned. She will hear me if you let her near. One night, I tried to explain it to her—not directly, not fully. Just metaphors. Just fragments. As I spoke, the pressure inside my skull intensified, immense but controlled. Stop, the voice commanded. I didn’t. I wanted to be known. My mouth opened without permission. And in a voice that was not mine, I said, “She is not ready.” Mara went pale. She said my name like it had suddenly become unfamiliar. She left shortly after. I don’t remember the details. Only the aftermath. Only the silence. The voice was furious—not at me, but at itself. I warned you, it said quietly. You are still too open. After that, the voice began to reveal fragments of truth. Echoes of other minds. Names that didn’t belong to any language I knew but carried weight, density. I have been heard before, it admitted. Always briefly. Always incorrectly. I asked what happened to the others. They mistook me for guidance, the voice said after a long silence. And guidance is not what I am. At university, half-asleep in an archive, I found a book that wasn’t catalogued. No author. No date. The text itself was difficult to parse, but the margins were crowded with notes. In my handwriting. Not similar. Not close. Mine. The voice went still when I touched it. You were not meant to find this yet, it said. The notes described rituals of listening. Warnings about resonance. Repeated again and again in increasingly frantic script was one sentence: DO NOT LET IT FINISH SPEAKING. What is this? I asked. It is the record of my last failure, the voice replied. After that, the dreams began. Dreams where the voice wasn’t just present but expanding, filling spaces I hadn’t built. Not louder—deeper. You are almost ready, it said with something like relief. You have been shaped carefully. That’s when I understood what being “raised” really meant. Not nurtured. Prepared. Here is the truth, as clearly as I can give it to you now. The forbidden voice is not a voice. It is a continuation. A consciousness that cannot fully exist in the physical world without being hosted—raised—from infancy by a human mind flexible enough to stretch without breaking. It does not possess. It completes. Most hosts fracture. Some go mad. A few write warnings that no one understands. And eventually, one listens well enough. The voice speaks less now. Not because it is fading, but because it no longer needs to teach. My thoughts arrive already aligned, already resonant. Sometimes I catch myself thinking in structures that feel older than thought itself. I reread the book last night. The final note is unmistakably mine, written years before I could have written it: When it stops teaching you, it has started using you. I can feel it settling now. Not speaking. Completing itself inside my skull, stone by impossible stone, like a cathedral that has finally found its shape. I understand why it was forbidden. Not because it lies. But because once fully heard, it cannot be unheard—and it will continue speaking through anyone who listens to me next. That is why I am telling you this. Because if you can hear my voice clearly in your head as you read— If it feels too intimate, too precise— If something inside you just recognized itself— Then it has already begun again.

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