echolocation: physiological process for locating objects…by

sound waves reflected back to the emitter—Merriam Webster

My partner is humming again, this time a Chopin Nocturne,

slightly off key as per usual, familiar enough that though

I’ve long since forgotten the specific title, I think I can guess

at the unconscious cause—

        we just left another small argument unfinished—

more mutual irritation really, spats about who forgot to start

the dishwasher, take the dog for a walk, thaw the salmon

            fillets for guests coming to dinner in an hour.

But she gets lost in the ensuing silences, disoriented by any

cold emptiness between us … so she throws out a

song, a sort of reconnoitering of marital spaces, reading how the

    sound rebounds off me back to her to determine how to

proceed—a ritual of call and response.

I think she might be part bat, or maybe shrew … wait for the 

metaphor because that wasn't an insult … they’re just two

of a few animals including dolphins and narwhals that have

evolved the extraordinary method of using self-generated

        waves and echoes to navigate their world’s dangerous 

terrain or, in her case, murky emotional waters.

    She has a range of vocalizations to match circumstance.

You’ve already heard of her penchant for using orchestral 

or piano music for more minor skirmishes, but for the

all-out row, testing the waters, measuring my reply means

Broadway, one of the great villain arias, usually Javert’s

“Stars” from Les Mis when she’s feeling conciliatory,

 

            or, when she’s not,

the Commendatore's operatic reverberations from “Don 

Giovanni,” the lyrics of which I don’t need to under-

stand, the sound itself sufficient, to know what it portends—

“Warning: Relationship-Wrecking Rocks Ahead: Exercise 

Caution in Response.”

 

Of all tricky relational soundscapes to map and maneuver, 

the trickiest is the one where she’s wrong and she knows

        it, knows that I know it and that I know she knows I 

know … difficult not because of the torturous logic, but

because if I’m smug even a little bit, her tone shifts to a 

little bit predatory—

        finding prey is, after all, one use of echolocation—

not a threat outright to me, still disconcerting enough to

            cause a fight-or-flight twinge in the chest when 

accompanied by her new soundtrack and persona, Audrey 

the 2nd, the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors 

intoning “Feed Me, Seymour, I’m Hungry” ...

it’s also tricky because there is no “right” response to that, 

except to soften the situation with the particular brand of 

understanding and good humor that only comes from two 

people who have bounced sound back and forth for so long 

that they understand—

        what not to say and when not to say it.

An odd, evolutionary hydrographic tactic, you might, or

might not, say, but, then, aren’t we all bats or porpoises 

or the lowly vole when it comes to love, blindly filling

        the void with our song, our hope that someone is 

indeed, there, listening, hearing …

every synapse straining to catch a response, faint as may 

    be, an echo of ourselves amplified by another into a

duet, disproving perhaps our greatest fear, caverned deep 

in our day-to-day melodies—

the apprehension that we might otherwise be utterly alone.