Speak Lower

"Speak slower. And lower."

That's the line I'm stealing. I said it eight years ago, on the morning I turned thirty, to the first people who talked to me after a week of saying nothing. This year I've been writing a book about that week, and the sentence keeps turning up in the drafts like a sock in the wrong drawer. Every time I tidy it into a chapter, it gets smaller. So I'm taking it out of the book and putting it somewhere else.

~

I'm five and a half feet tall. I went into that week at 58 kg and came out at 53. I did it in my own flat: seven days blindfolded, earplugs in, no talking, one litre of coconut water a day from seven packs lined up in a corner I could reach, and nothing solid except a tiny ball of turmeric and neem once a day. No doctor signed off on it. No blood tests. My wife was supportive and thought I was a bit crazy, and she was right on both counts.

The idea had been sitting in me since 2005. I was in college studying computers, and the papers were full of a young man in Nepal, Ram Bahadur Bomjon, who appeared to sit still for days. I watched the footage. Then I kept going back to it, on and off, for years. The rest of us needed three snacks and a phone to get through an afternoon. He seemed to sit through it. I couldn't stop watching.

~

Day seven was the loudest day of my life, and nobody in the room said a word.

My head would not stop. Take it off. Not yet. You've done enough. Not yet. You built this room, you can leave it. Not yet. I had designed the whole thing myself and I was negotiating with it like a hostage.

Then it was the twenty-fifth of September, my birthday, and the blindfold came off.

Light came in like it had been waiting outside the door with a grudge. I could open my eyes about halfway. I cried, and then I laughed, and then I just sat there with my eyes half shut, doing neither. I hugged someone. After a week of almost nobody touching me, it felt like being handed back my own arms.

And then they talked.

They weren't loud. They were normal. That was the problem. Normal speech after seven days of silence sounded like a radio switched on in the next room and then carried right up to my ear. Every word landed on top of the one before it. I couldn't get underneath any of them.

So I said it, slowly, because slow was the only speed my mouth had left.

"Speak slower. And lower."

I meant it kindly. It came out sounding like a man trying not to startle the furniture. I asked them to be here, in the room, and to say each word like they meant that one and not the next. And they did. People who love you will put up with a lot on your birthday.

~

The whole day went at that speed.

On the stairs I held the rail and a friend's hand, which is two more handholds than a thirty-year-old usually needs. Getting into a car was hard, and once it moved it felt far too fast. We went to the beach for the sunrise, and I stood with sand under my feet while the water came in and went out without explaining itself. I video-called my mum. My first food was mashed and bland, a baby's first meal, eaten by a man who had just asked a room full of adults to use their indoor voices.

Here's the part I've never managed to fit into the book.

The month after, I ran a marathon barefoot.

I'd trained for more than four months before any of this. One week, I needed a rail and a hand to get down a flight of stairs. A few weeks later, forty-two kilometres of road under bare feet. Same body. Same five and a half feet.

~

I'm vegetarian. I still eat once a day, rarely twice. I still run barefoot, on the beach, on grass, sometimes on city streets, and the worst thing I've ever stepped on is hot asphalt.

And I have a son now. He's four months old.

At night I chant him to sleep. Slowly, without deciding to. Low, without deciding to. One sound at a time, at the speed my mouth found on the morning I turned thirty.

He has only just arrived. The world is far too loud for him, and he can't ask for anything yet.

So I ask for him.

Slower. Lower.

~

The line I stole is one I said out loud years before I ever wrote it down. Is there a sentence of yours like that, something you said once that you'd steal back if you could?

This is one person's experience, not medical advice. Please talk to a doctor before any fast.