The Floor After the Call

January seventh.

The call was somewhere between an hour and an hour and fifteen, I stopped checking partway through, which is usually how I know it's a good one. When I hung up I stayed where I was, which was on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets, because I'd drifted there at some point in the second half and the floor felt fine. It still felt fine. The mug was lukewarm. Gerald's vine was doing its thing on the shelf above the stove. The apartment had that particular quality it gets in January after nine o'clock, which is very still and very itself.

I don't have a word for the feeling after a long call home that isn't quite sad and isn't quite full. It's something in between, like the apartment recalibrates around you after an hour of it being somewhere else too.

floor-sitting era, january 2022

You come back into the room slowly. The overhead light feels more overhead than it did before. You notice the collapsed bowl the way you don't usually notice it. The five things on the windowsill. The card. The photos. Carol's small object. All of it just sitting there holding the same positions it always holds, patient in the way objects are patient, which is to say completely without effort.

I took a photo of my hands around the mug because I wanted to keep the specific quality of that moment, which I could not have explained to you at the time and can only barely explain now. Some nights the kitchen floor is the right place to land. Some calls leave you in a particular kind of quiet that isn't emptiness, it's more like the room after music. You're still in it. The notes are still in the air. You're just not playing anymore.