When I had to repeat my order thrice to the waiter at the local, and after he had turned his back to our table, my friend said to me that I was not really very audible. "Your voice was very soft," she said. She did not mean it as a compliment of any measure, I could see. 

I had heard this said of me before. Something I might be reading aloud for the partner, because he 'reads' better that way, was not loud enough, he had complained. Yet, I argued, with him and her now, that my voice sounded rather loud in my head. In the quietness of my studio when I articulated some sentences before I was to type or after the words had already been birthed on screen, my voice would pierce the air, sharp, intrusive like a rude shock. I had always thought my intonation was loud enough to cut through the thick of a roomful of speech, and had always until now remembered to speak softer, mindful.

Maybe I didn't have to remember these things, after all, I wondered.