A voice in the old recording

An original first-person fictional account of an invented sound-recording discovery.

The file was labelled Garden, Sunday. I expected birds and the soft scrape of chairs on paving. The first sound was my own laugh, so abrupt and high that I reached for the volume control before recognising it.

My cousin had recorded a family afternoon years earlier while testing a microphone. He had kept the file because the wind made an unusual sound in the leaves. The conversation mattered so little to him that he had never mentioned it. To me, it arrived like a door opening in the wrong wall.

I heard myself interrupting someone. Then I heard the patient pause that followed. I could not remember the argument, or even whether it had been an argument. In the recording, my younger voice was confidently certain about a subject I had since changed my mind about twice. I wanted to explain this to the people in the garden, who continued speaking without leaving a gap for my correction.

Farther into the file, the microphone was set down. A cup knocked against something hard. My grandmother asked whether anyone wanted the last slice of cake. Nobody answered immediately. She asked again, and I heard myself say that I would have it if no one else did. The caution in that small sentence surprised me more than the earlier certainty.

I played the file once more, this time without trying to decide whether I liked the person I had been. There was the interruption, the unearned confidence and the careful offer about the cake. There were also the leaves my cousin had meant to record. Near the end, everyone became quiet long enough for the wind to be the clearest voice in the garden.

How does the writer show the narrator's changing thoughts and feelings while listening to the recording? Support your answer with references to the passage.