An Hour I Didn't Plan For

I called Carol to check in. That was the plan: a check-in, maybe fifteen minutes, the kind of call that gets made on a Wednesday evening when the week has been unremarkable and you have a window before you would otherwise just sit down and read.

An hour and six minutes later I was still on the kitchen floor. I had started the call sitting at the table, moved to the windowsill ledge when Carol mentioned something about the fall light where she is, and ended up on the floor somewhere after we started talking about my mother, which we do, sometimes, carefully, in the way of two people who both loved the same person and are still learning what that means between them. Carol said something I didn't expect. I'm not going to write it here, not yet, not until I've had a few days to figure out whether it belongs on the page or just in the kitchen.

The windowsill doesn't move. That's the whole point of it.

After I hung up I sat there for a while. The windowsill was doing what it does in September evenings, the cord's shadow was going a little long, the two photographs catching the overhead light at the angle that makes them look like they're glowing from within rather than reflecting. The two prints are still leaning against the wall just out of frame. I didn't move them. I took a picture of myself instead, which is not something I usually do, but something about the hour warranted a record.

Hands after a long call. Nothing to hold onto.

I don't know how to describe missing something you technically have. Carol is there. The correspondence is open. The small object she sent is on the windowsill, exactly where it belongs. And still. Thirty-eight years old, sitting on the kitchen floor, barefoot, one hand in my lap, not quite crying. That seems worth writing down, even if I don't entirely understand it yet.