I always knew you would come back to me.
You, the perceptive younger woman who forced me to communicate verbally at a more than superficial level; my amanuensis. You, who in a day tied the severed vocal cords which had been cut off since birth, and gave them some sort of function.
A grating voice emerged from the strands of flesh you had pulled together. We both nodded and agreed - yes, it's not bad. It doesn't have the booming presence of an orator, but it strings words together well enough for you to pass as a human. Don't overdo it - for a while you'll cough up mouthfuls of blood when you try to speak. That's quite normal, but you'll probably find it unpleasant.
If you're sensible, you'll not try to say any tonguetwisters just yet. The repetitiveness of the sounds has been known to reach the resonant frequency of vocal cords, and shatter them like glass. Then you'll be back to square one, broken and silent.
I urge you to remember that all I've done is operate on you. You're not perfected, and nor will you be. You have the (limited) gift of speech, but you must be sparing. I remind you of the right leg which inevitably gives way when you run on it too hard, and you pull up with your blank face for once expressive, pleading for the pain to stop. So it is with the cords - they're delicate little ligaments and take none too kindly to being stretched.
A fortnight of post-operative attention, and you had gone. There are other voiceless ones to fix, and fix them you must. The reparation of voice boxes is your vocation - no time to waste talking to those who have been mended as best they can be.
Like the inventors of the computer, doing computation held no interest for them once they had proved it could be done. For you, conversation with the newly-articulate is a pain, tedious. Empowering others to make sounds is what it's about; the sounds they make are just so many vibrations. Only L is interested in the precise arrangement of sounds.
I always knew you would come back to me. I didn't know the form would be so obvious; another dark-skinned female with similar looks, similar views. Randomly asking me questions as I waited to go home following (ironically) the pulling to the point of breaking my infirm right leg. Such things are co-incidental, yet we make so much of them.
You - your likeness - sat with me the whole length of my journey; telling me about God, and how you're under pressure to get married, and how you jump into bed with anything at all because you don't like yourself. I'd never seen you before in my life, and you spoke to me as though you'd known me forever.
It occurred to me when I reached my stop that you were the doctor's representative, her simulacrum. Now that I've had one final visit - you've not experienced any complications, nogomet? - then I am finally discharged and allowed to cast you and your medical paraphernalia into the receptacle of history.
