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People save voicemails to remind them of their loved one’s voices. All I’m leaving is my relationship duress, off key attempts at Leith Ross, and detailed seven minute thirty one second clips of water dripping because I thought I might be Maggie Rogers and integrate it into my art. I never did.

What if all that’s left of me are my voice memos? If someday, my body is laid into the ground, donated to division three nursing students who have nightmares about my feet, or shoveled into a vase with excessive breathing room and my loved ones publish my voice memos as a eulogy? I’d roll over and scurry my little non-existent legs out of there! Surely my breath would linger satanically in the ears of whoever thought pigs in the blanket were appropriate visitation hors d’oeuvres. Those mummified meat sticks accost me. Barring my family’s tasteless choice, my memos would be on loop with a slideshow of my double chins. Nobody cares about a dead girl’s self esteem when making the funerary slideshow. Your passing makes them grateful for all your crooked teeth, forgetting that they had to remind you when sour cream and onion kettle chips were lodged near your canine three days a week. 

Is it out of spite that people have open caskets? I’m dead and consenting to nothing. No, I do not want Patrick to lean in and grab my shoulders for a double love tap. No, I do not want to see grandma’s rouge red lip stain across my cheek. No, I do not want anyone to see the corners of my mouth turn black. No, I do not want them to cake me in foundation and color correction for viewing let alone burying. A brutal joke it would be to clog my pores that never even wore makeup when pulsing. And, how does that disintegrate? Does it shrink with your skin and crinkle into the eventual body goo? Would it be thick enough to suction from my face like a mask and lay in the casket pool? Either way, I’m actively threatening my mother for having pressed play on memo 34. Despite the fact that I recorded it, I wish for no one to hear my forty two seconds of screeching I thought was singing. Or memo 203 where I thought I hit that high note with Beyoncé and absolutely did not. Mother’s smile from the tech booth glistens with tears rolling into and drooling out of her mouth while I’m trying to strangle her with my mist hands because I know even the neighborhood dogs are wincing. 

To think that you might attach memo 48 on an email addressed to that lecturing professor of anatomy lab who wants to humanize the bags of bodies for his students makes me want to volunteer to walk the plank. Students who’s coke nails will inevitable slice through their blue nitrile gloves and stab my real, vulnerable flesh will have heard my drunken cadence fail at setting reminders for the following day play aloud in their Wednesday lecture. I don’t know about you, but the thought of a little lesbian pre-med wannabe bluntly pressing my lymph nodes in my armpit after hearing me admit I’ve gone without deodorant for nearly ten days makes me want to a) snort a little giggle b) sew myself back up and verbally abuse god until he admits I’ve been through enough embarrassment for a lifetime and sends me back in there to beat a new rhythm. 

Even worse, my ashes could be vibrated by the vocal entries about all the fights i’ve ever had with my significant other. Your feet shuffle to my jar held in the hands of my love who’s trying to subtly suffocate me for only leaving him my angry, heartbroken voice. I never record anything about the richness of my life because one does not overthink the best chocolate pudding they’ve ever had. One does overthink that time that he said that one thing that he must have meant to connect to that other thing that directly relates to, oh, that one time that points glaringly to the specific insecurity I know he knows about. Every little disagreement or disappointment in my romantic life has a carbon copy in my memos for the rainy day that I’ll add another. I never listen back to them, so why should you at my visitation? It might be the only thing left beyond this squatty capped ceramic filled with “me” dust, but let me assure you it’s not worth saving. 

Amidst mourning my sweet ass, you might cry out, “yet you’ve saved them!” Sure! Fair enough! Might I remind you, however, of what else i’ve left behind without a choice because death does not email you two weeks in advance telling you to clear your shit out and screen print posters for your estate sale ASAP. Death does let you leave behind your camera roll with a bunch of turtle faced selfies in the easily accessible recently deleted folder. Not to mention that death lets you leave the earth without throwing out the spoiled three half cans of garbanzo beans in respective containers on the lower shelf in your fridge before panicking you with a final breath. That whore, death, won’t even let you have two more days to heal that pimple you picked at, so why would it warn you to get rid of those three size “way too small” real denim jeans filling the bottom left corner of your closet? Not to mention the fur lined jacket I bought three years ago for a future niece or nephew that’s stashed in my parent’s attic. If you need more to go off of here, browse my instagram saved posts and see how many recipes I haven’t made or find my winter clothes bin in the cream cabinet that insulates five or six white shirts with armpit stains I won’t wear until cleaning them which I will never do. 

Regardless, people who talk shit about the voice memo app personally offend me. They stab my little musing fifteen year old self in the heart and my twenty one year old self gets red faced angry. You’re telling me that you don’t want to talk all of your life’s problems into a small black mirror that definitely sells all your information no matter how many privacy settings you have on it? It’s got you incriminated already. I take that as the very excuse to burden it with all my existential crises. But, if you love me, you’ll take my lifeless body as a sign to run to my phone and delete them before any sort of nostalgia is wrongfully attached. If you’re a good friend, you’d know it’s better to forget my voice than allow my dirty laundry to be unwashed. Run the heavily soil cycle while you’re at it.