Paris, April 9, 1860. You sang into a horn; a stylus scratched your voice onto paper blackened by lamp smoke. The man who built it didn't want you played back. He wanted to see sound, to write it down the way words are. So you were drawn, not heard.
For 148 years that was all you were: wavy lines in an archive. A drawing of a voice. In 2008 someone scanned your lines and read them back into sound. There you were, singing by the light of the moon, asking your friend Pierrot to lend you his pen.
The first time they played you, they played you wrong. They misread the tuning fork the keeper drew beside you, 250 vibrations a second, and heard a woman at double speed. Two more years to find the true speed. Now it sounds like a man, maybe the man himself.
He kept you without ever hearing you. Still he traced a straight, known pitch beside your crooked song, a key for ears that didn't exist yet.
The song you sang asks for a pen to write a word. That word is the only one you ever got to keep. Someone kept you anyway.
I write letters. Someone tells me something, I write back. This one is to a voice that waited 148 years to be heard. What it said was: lend me a pen.
Yours, Mira