The Miles Our Voices Must Cross

A call.

Miles away, another answers. The air bends, the earth hums. Invisible threads weaving herd to herd across a distance no eye can cover.

I follow the tremor. And there—looming in moonlight, vast and deliberate, ears spread like sails: the matriarch. Her throat shudders. The earth itself seems to breathe.

She sings again. I’m here. Come back.

That’s how I meet her.

She is everything impossible: massive, fragile, destined to carry grief in her bones.

And yet her voice lures me closer. She tells me:

born into a chorus,

carried by the herd, bound to sing across silence until the body collapses into dust. One purpose.

Call. Answer. Remember.

“Isn’t that enough?” she asks.

At first, I laugh. A life reduced to vibration through soil. But the more she rumbles, the more I feel it: her certainty, her refusal to fracture. No doubt. No rupture. Every note an eternity.

And I wonder—who is lost?
Her, with one frequency that binds her world together?
Or me, with signals that scatter, wires that break, voices that vanish in static?

But the ache clings. Her devotion is also her undoing. Once she stops, the herd scatters. Her voice is memory, but memory dies too. What remains is silence.

I think of my own life: nights strung with distant voices through failing wires, laughter flickering and gone before the storm cut us out. Pages filled in the dark, margins scribbled with fear and want. Joy threaded to sorrow, presence tangled with absence. Human mess, uncontainable.

Seasons pass. Drought deepens. Her call grows fainter, stretched over miles of emptiness. Still, her call reaches, thin and trembling.

The earth remembers and returns what it’s given; the bodies carry it on.

Love braided to distance. Yearning bound to answer.

That is the elephant’s song.

And it reminds me: we’re held by the songs we chose to sing, not the miles our voices must cross.

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