The Call Ran Long

August tenth.

I had not planned to be on the phone for an hour and forty minutes. I picked up expecting twenty, maybe thirty, the catch-up version, the are-you-okay version, and then somehow we were still talking at the point where the light in the kitchen had moved all the way across the floor and Gerald's vine had gone from bright to shadowed and back again. I didn't notice any of it until after I hung up.

There's a specific kind of quiet that follows a long call with someone you love. Not emptiness, something more like the room being slightly larger than it was before, or the air pressure adjusting. I sat on the kitchen floor for a while after, which is not something I usually do, and I noticed the windowsill the way I notice it sometimes: as a fact rather than a decision. The cord, the photographs, Carol's small object, the gap. All of it just there, doing what it does.

still on the kitchen floor ten minutes after hanging up

I didn't say anything important on the call. We laughed about something I can't even fully reconstruct now, and talked about nothing in particular, and at some point said goodbye in the way that takes four attempts before it actually happens. I hung up feeling full in a way I hadn't expected to need.

The coffee I'd made before picking up was cold by the end. I drank it anyway.