I Was Desperate To Hear My Boyfriend’s Voice Again

How to listen to Alexa commands from lost loved ones

Tara Purswani
4 min readMay 10, 2023
Photo by Darina Belonogova

Ladies and Gentlemen, you can also follow these instructions if you need proof your partner is cheating on you.

It’s an awful feeling to lose or forget dear memories, especially if you don’t have media to jog your memory. Have you ever tried to recreate a moment in your mind from scratch? Or forget what someone looks like? Maybe you went on a vacation and lost all the photos before the cloud days.

I lost my boyfriend in April 2022. And when it happened, I scrambled to find anything that would make him feel any level of tangible again — images, objects, smells, and sounds.

Turns out I could not find a single recording of his voice.

I scoured our WhatsApp exchange hoping to find at least one voice recording. I was learning Russian, one of his native languages. We did a majority of our flirting in Russian, but it was all text. No audio message, no voicemail.

I missed his voice so badly.

I had this one stupid Turkey video. Yes, a turkey video. It was close to Thanksgiving and he worked in the suburbs of NJ as a mail carrier. He saw a turkey in someone’s front yard and he chased it around babbling some jibberish in Russian. I…

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Tara Purswani

Linguiphile and AI Data Trainer at Meta. Slavic language enthusiast, striving for fluency in Russian, juggling Ukrainian; dabbling in Icelandic and more...