Sing > Listen on BandCamp
The gym was its usual self that afternoon, metal clinks and grunts, the thump of bass-heavy tunes, the faint hum of treadmills like an endless tide. And then, without warning, something split the air.
At first, I thought it was tucked into the overhead speakers, some chorus layered behind the beat. But no, this sound floated above the noise. A voice, clear and shimmering, cut through the stale fluorescent air with impossible purity. It didn’t fit, not at all. It rose much brighter, like sunlight breaking into a windowless hall.
I froze, half-turned on my machine, ears straining. No one else seemed to notice. Around me, people kept lifting, scrolling, laughing, and checking mirrors. I was the only one stilled by it. That aloneness made it feel even more otherworldly, like a gift dropped into my hands, meant only for me.
It wasn’t an everyday voice. Not casual but high, lilting, yet rooted with undertones that spoke of training, sweet and angelic, as if trembling on the edge of heaven itself. Whoever sang wasn’t fooling around. This was a voice born for song.
And then I saw him.
The young man I’d noticed a hundred times before, always wandering the gym with his phone, ear buds in, rarely exercising, and never speaking. He was unusual, maybe high-spectrum, maybe just different from all of us. Happy, always present. I’d never heard his voice, not once, not in two years.
Yet here he was—the source of all that beauty.
The chorus rose again, longer this time. Stretching like silk, holding for what must have been a minute. My body ached to walk toward him, to see his face as the sound poured out, but I didn’t. To intrude would have felt like stepping into a cathedral mid-sermon. My mind’s eye pictured two guys joking, showing off, but now I couldn’t find a secondary. This was him, and only him, his voice reaching up and away.
The song itself was unfamiliar. Not pop, not gospel, nothing I could pin to knowledge of music or radio. It felt custom-made, as if the melody had been designed for the precise architecture of his throat. Notes light as golden dust, lyrics drifting but full. He sang as though the song belonged to him entirely. Maybe it did.
I sat transfixed, machine forgotten, breath now shallow. In those minute’s time folded. The gym dissolved. There was only voice, vibration, and the sense that the ordinary had been torn open to reveal something divine.
When silence returned, it landed heavy, almost unbearable. I blinked, my chest tight, my eyes wet. Who was he? Just a peculiar young man marking time in a gym, or an untethered angel slipped into our midst?
I’ve thought about this moment many times since that day. Each time I replay it, the tears return, tears not just of beauty but of recognition. I was as if God had leaned down into a drab gym on an ordinary afternoon to remind me: heaven speaks when it chooses. Sometimes, through a choir. Sometimes, through a stranger in a strange place.
And maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t an accident.
TK (with CI)
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