ballast ovenbird Have you heard of the loneliest whale? The one who has only been heard and never seen, calling at a frequency of 52 hertz, its voice an outlier to its own kind who typically vocalize between 15-30 hertz. Some say it’s been calling for a mate for decades, finding no buoyant creature that speaks in the same range, roaming the ocean singing its strange, high-pitched song and never hearing an answer. And everyone says, oh it’s so sad to sing a song that no one can hear. But that’s not it at all. The torment is in knowing that your voice, though anomalous, is perfectly audible. Others have the capacity to hear the music you bring to the world. They hear, and they turn away, unmoved by the sounds your soul makes. And do you know what it’s like to find someone, in this vast, eternal ocean, who hears your ebbing cry, on the brink of hopelessness, and does not find it strange at all, in fact finds it more beautiful than any music they’ve ever heard, and turns their face towards you and says, “please, will you sing that again? Because I think I’ve been waiting forever to hear the melody your mind can make,” so you do and they sing their own song back and it harmonizes in this uncanny, aching way, and you look at each other and your clenched fists loosen and drop the belief, like a time smoothed pebble, that you are wrong, so very wrong for this world and it falls to the ground at your feet and you watch it leave you and you feel the hollow space that is open now in your cupped palm and you let the soft roundness of the other’s voice fill that hollow and you feel its weight anchoring you, all the ballast you need to steady the keeling of your storm tossed heart. 260111 what's it to you? who go blather from