The Call Ran Long

December ninth. The apartment goes quiet in a specific way this month. Not the usual quiet, the building settles, Gerald does nothing, the windowsill holds its arrangement the same as always, but a different register of quiet, the kind that makes you pick up the phone.

I called Carol. I didn't plan to stay on the line for as long as I did, but that's how it goes with her now. We've gotten better at it over the years, the two of us: better at not filling every pause, better at letting a sentence sit before someone follows it. She asked about the cord on the windowsill, she's seen the photos I've posted, apparently, and I told her it had been there since September 2022 and I still don't know exactly what it is for, and she said that sounded about right for a made thing. We stayed on that for a while.

after the call

After I hung up I stood at the counter with the mug going cold and thought about missing home. Not a specific home, not a specific person, just the general condition of home, which is different in December than in any other month. The windowsill helped. It usually does. Carol's small object is there, and the two photographs of my mother at twenty-two and a little older, and the letterpress card I printed years ago, and the cord, and the gap where the collapsed bowl used to sit before it moved to the shelf above the stove. It's a whole accounting.

the windowsill, December

The call ran long. That's the whole post. Sometimes that's the thing.