Deep in a canyon where the walls stood close enough to throw a voice back at itself, there lived — or so the local children liked to imagine — an echo that had grown lonely from being only ever a reply and never a beginning.
A girl named Yuki used to visit the canyon every summer and call out into it, just to hear her own voice come bouncing back changed and delayed, layered over itself like a second singer answering the first. She liked to imagine the echo as its own small creature, trapped in the stone, only ever allowed to repeat, never permitted to start a sentence of its own.
"Doesn't it get tired," she asked her grandmother once, "always answering and never asking anything itself?"
Her grandmother, who had been bringing Yuki to this same canyon since she was small enough to be carried, considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Maybe the echo isn't sad about that at all," she said. "Maybe it's simply waiting for someone to teach it that an answer and a beginning can be the same sound."
Yuki didn't understand this until many years later, long after her grandmother had passed and the visits to the canyon had stopped, when she found herself alone in an apartment late one night, humming a tune that had been stuck in her head all week. She'd always waited, before, for someone else to harmonize with her — a friend, a choir, anyone to fill in the answering part of a call-and-response song she'd loved since childhood. That night, with no one else awake to hear her, she sang the question line herself, and then, without quite deciding to, she sang the answer too, in the very same breath, the very same voice.
It startled her at first, hearing herself complete her own sentence. Then it didn't. She sang it again, call and response both hers, and the room held the sound the way the old canyon used to, giving nothing back but what she'd already given it.
She thought of her grandmother then, and the echo, and understood finally what the canyon had been quietly teaching her every summer of her childhood: that a voice singing alone in an empty room is not a voice waiting for company. It is, if it only realizes it, already the whole choir it ever needed to be.
