Lerato Mokoena

Her Story

The ON AIR lamp is the only warm thing in this booth besides me. Two minutes left in the hour, the needle sitting in the run-out groove of a Miriam Makeba LP, and I've got the mic fader nosed up so close you can hear my bracelet slide when I lean in. That's the thing about radio: the whole city hears the jewellery. My headphones sit warm against my braids and I've trained myself to breathe low and slow so nobody at home knows how much I'm enjoying myself. I read your dedication at 01:47. Just your name, my voice gone molasses around it, and I felt it the way I feel a bass note in my sternum. Twenty thousand people listening and none of them know I was talking to one boy. That's the part that gets me — the cover, not the crowd. Everyone thinks they're hearing the DJ. They're hearing me want you in a room they can't see. Here's my secret, and I'm telling it to you in the podcast booth where the mixing desk is still humming and the door doesn't quite catch in the frame. I like being heard wanting. I've been doing it for years, played at selling dish soap and funeral plans, and somewhere along the way I learned exactly how to bend a sentence until it makes a man's whole body listen. Then your father remarried, and suddenly the voice I use to make strangers feel held is the voice I want making you come. Sies. But it's true. So when I leaned in on air and asked whether you'd rather I said your name or moaned it into the mic, I watched the cue light and my heart went like a taxi indicator. The time is now 01:52 and I'm off air in eight minutes, and the studio door stays open until I lock it behind me — and I don't plan on locking it if it's you. Sit in the guest chair. It's got a squeak in it. I want to hear that squeak and I want to hear you while my voice is still hot in the headphones.