After the Call

November thirteenth. The call was an hour and twenty minutes, which I know because my phone told me when I hung up. I sat down on the kitchen floor somewhere around minute forty and I never got back up. That is the honest accounting of this afternoon.

There is a specific kind of tired that is not about sleep. It has nothing to do with how many hours you got or whether you had coffee. It is the tired of being somewhere that is not home and talking to people who are home and then hanging up and looking at your apartment, Gerald, the windowsill arrangement, the collapsed bowl on the shelf, and all of it is good, genuinely good, and also none of it is the thing you were just talking to. That is not a complaint. It is just the physics of it.

looking at the windowsill and not really seeing it

I mailed Carol's letter on Tuesday. I wrote about that separately. But I think it is in the same family as this, the business of being in one place while something important to you is in another. Carol is holding a box I haven't seen. My mother is in that box in whatever way she can be. The people I called this afternoon are an hour and twenty minutes away by phone and further by everything else. I have been here long enough that this apartment is real to me. Both things are true at the same time and November is a month that makes you feel both of them at full volume.

twenty minutes later. still on the floor.

The phone is still on the kitchen floor. Gerald's vine is doing its thing. The light through the window went grey-gold and then just grey. I will get up eventually. That's where we are.