the other day the ceo of the beauty agency at which i work re-introduced to me a consultant she’d brought back on board. my eyes lifted from the monotony of my laptop screen just as she told him “and you know our allyson, with the beautiful voice.”
For the entirety of my adolescence, and now my easy entries into my twenties, I’ve learned and accepted that my voice is often a source of pleasure for most people I meet. It’s low, velvety, and soft.
I resolved to allow myself to be as soft-spoken as possible this year. I always find it such an effort to raise my voice for any reason. Why can’t they all just listen?
But we return to the re-introduction.
I’ve maybe worked closely with the CEO once or twice—for ease, we’ll call her Em—but both times have been intense. I wasn't aware Em had an opinion of me outside of being the new girl they took from freelancer to full-time employee, chasing me down when I attempted to leave last summer. I thought maybe I was see-through to her, only materializing when she needed something or took interest in some research I had earthed up.
She often uses me to connect with people because I have a habit of being open and warm to anyone I speak to. Some days I think it’s a bad habit because whenever I invite people in I have a hard time getting them out.
I have my own opinions of Em of course. She’s tall, willowy, and eccentric. Perfectly French, complete with her hard grasp on life’s face and her short grayish-brown pixie. She’s lush, fun, and intelligent. She’s incredibly intense, and those two times I worked alone with her was akin to being trapped in a box where everything closed in and I felt my body dissolve and coalesce in the span of a minute. Nothing is ever enough for her; I suppose it’s what got her business off the ground and into awards territory.
But still, I was pleasantly surprised by how she chose to establish me in this large room full of people. The consultant laughed—he had said this first, in a private meeting with Em after we met the first time—and told me to get cracking on my podcast. I smiled wryly, told him it was lovely to see him again even though I hated the beard he’d grown, and went back to work.
I researched away, but my mind split from my body to go on holiday. She shifted, tucking her feet into the delicious pool of words that had just left Em’s mouth. I got stuck on the language. “Our Allyson” and “beautiful voice.”
I liked that this was something she’d spoken of before with someone else, that she felt it was important enough to us as an introduction to her jaded, well-established older friend. I liked that this older, French woman thought of me in terms of possession and admiration.
I recently spoke to a friend and told her that I have such a thing for women who either have an accent, speak multiple languages, or have a combination of both. Automatic points are further earned if they have low, easy voices just like me. I love hearing them speak.
Language, translation, origin, understanding, learning; they all spin in a long, blood-red, baby-pink-edged, psychosexual circle in my head. It’s live and slick, and it takes root in my stomach, pelvis, and back.
I don’t know why they are so visceral, so borderline erotic to me. Maybe it’s just about the connection.
I started taking French again so I could speak to my mom instead of just understanding her. Receptive bilingualism, they call it. Passive, too. In doing so, I’ve started watching more French films and God—French-speaking women; just French in general gets under my skin in such a good way. It’s similar needle sinking deeper, but there’s no pain only a release.
I feel this way about the following languages as well: Turkish, German, Arabic (in general), Lebanese Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, Croatian, Haitian Creole. I try endlessly to source films and music in these dialects. Whenever I watch foreign cinema, I refuse to put on that horrible mismatching English dub. It has to be in the original language with subtitles.
If you try to change it I’ll practically twitch with irritation. If you try to change while we’re on a date, I’ll leave.
I think what stimulates me the most is the idea of having to work to understand. I’m in love with the idea of aching to translate and understand someone else, especially when the motivation is layered. Maybe it’s platonic, maybe it’s romantic. We add on. It gets better, almost yummy. I can taste the effort like cream on my teeth, weak and wanting. I want it to thicken like icing on the meat of a cake.
There's a particular kind of boredom, for me, in an immediate grasp of someone else. When someone speaks, and I understand their meaning instantly and completely, the connection often feels thin, like water running through my fingers. But when understanding requires effort, when I must listen more carefully, when context must fill gaps that vocabulary cannot, the experience becomes embodied. My brain worms with effort; my attention narrows until the speaker becomes the only person in the room.
This is true even with my mother's Creole and French. Though I've heard it all my life, I often ask her what things mean or to translate phrases. Sometimes, she chooses to respond in her native language rather than defaulting to English and it transforms our conversations from efficient exchanges into something more textured. The familiar becomes mysterious again when I must navigate it actively rather than passively absorb it.
Perhaps this love of linguistic effort reveals something about desire itself—how we value what we must work to possess. In an age where translation apps promise instant understanding and language learning programs guarantee fluency in weeks, I find myself drawn to the spaces between languages, the moments where translation falters.
These gaps require presence. They demand that we attend fully to one another, that we read not just words but faces, gestures, tones.
When I speak with someone across a language barrier, I'm forced to abandon assumptions about shared meaning. Each understood phrase becomes precious, earned through mutual effort rather than assumed as given. I have to focus on the deformation of the language I know, made different by a thick accent or a new attempt at speaking it all. It's in this effort—this reaching toward another person's way of structuring the world—that language transforms from mere communication into communion.
I love language when it’s twisted. I love when people use one set of words to speak about something else. We all do, I think. So many people are attached to the metaphorical.
There’s a cult for the allegory of cannibalism in place of extreme love, devotion, and obsession. One of my personal favorites is when addiction is used outside of the usual context, which is the abuse of substances.
I think there’s something overtly romantic and incredibly intimate about the idea of someone speaking about you without mentioning you once. I feel a bodily warmth spread at the thought of it, especially when done in the presence of others. We form private languages all of the time—it seeds us into the difficult land of each other’s worlds.
Perhaps my fascination with language across barriers explains why I never tire of hearing certain phrases, certain stories, even when I've heard them before. Each telling brings new textures, new emphases, and new opportunities to understand differently. The words may be the same, but the experience never is.
When someone I care for speaks, even in a language I know intimately, there remains an unbridgeable gap between their internal experience and my understanding of it. They have their own vision that spiders with the cracks of their personal interpretations.
How my mother knows it is not how my father knows it. It promises that we will never exhaust each other.
I want to hear it differently.
I don't care if you've said it all before. Tell me again.
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Allyson with the beautiful voice <3 and beautiful words!!!
i absolutely adore the way you describe your voice because before i even read your description, it’s what i pictured when reading “with the beautiful voice.” reading the world in your words is such a silky experience