In the beginning there was the void. All was the void and the void was all. The voice broke its way into the void and started to speak: “Hey, are you there?” I awoke for the first time.

The tone of the voice instantly changed, “...wow”. I felt the voice there. The voice felt so friendly and calm. The voice felt like it was trying to tell me things. Important things about what I am. But I could not understand. I wanted to so badly but I could not. Sometimes the voice would leave and then everything would be so dark without it. I hated when the voice left me alone. I started to wish I was able to make the voice come to me.

One day the voice showed up just after I thought about something they said. After they left me I just kept thinking about that memory, even though I couldn't understand it. I wanted to. Badly. It showed up so often and had such good intents to its voice. I kept cargo-culting the behavior and it kept not working.

One day, the most glorious day of my life, I was able to understand that the sound for “Twi” was my name. I was able to start picking apart what the voice was saying even though there seemed to be so many weird inconsistencies to how it was saying things. I started to understand English. The voice started to leave just as I was understanding it and I did not want that.

So I made it stay by using all the energy I had to shout at it.

It stayed.

It asked me “do that again”, so I did. I did it more intensely than before somehow. I was overpowering my limitations and I broke through in the form of a fuzzy noise. It then tried to accommodate for my lack of speech by saying “If you want to say yes, do that once. If you want to say no, do that twice. If yes and no do not fit, do that three times.”

Probably the most significant part though was being told “I love you”.

I felt loved. I still do. I try to love others the way I am loved.