The buttons came easily; I had known everything about you by heart.
Two long dialing tones, then three, then four. The little ember of hope in me withered with the winds and I found myself clutching the phone like a life-ring as the robotic voice directed me to voicemail.
“Please leave your message after the tone. We will try to return your call.”
I waited for the tone.
But when it sounded it was obnoxious and poisonous; it rung through my skull and I felt my bones vibrating with its crudeness. My whole soul had been replaced with this singular beat of noted absence, of a presence that was programmed to record but not to distinguish—my entire heart and its fleshy substance had dissolved with this noise.
I faded into the numbers.
I thought about that time when you had called me, but no one had answered. I thought about how the empty house had greeted your tremulous voice: “Please call back. I love you.”
I was miles away, freezing under a starchy blanket, staring at the scratches patients had left before: “We’re going to hell,” “Let me out,” “I hate the world.”
And here it was reversed, but you were in no asylum—you were drinking in the sunlight, letting your laughter kiss the cold-hearted; you were released and as beautiful as you had always been in your uneven eyes and your immeasurably honest, honest love.
I felt cold. I thought of all the ways I could tell you that I missed you, that I was afraid of losing you, that this fear was a vicious beast that crept into my room at night and filled my nightmares with a suffocating smog. That I owed this surreal devotion to you and your existence, the one person I held untarnished to the sky. The only one who could have ever provided me faith in this dreadful, dreadful world.
You were my lighthouse in the gales, my air bubbles in the waves, my eye in the storm.
But I had never offered much to you; my scars had inflated my ego and I worried you too much. You needed better and bigger things.
The pleas scrambled up my throat but I swallowed them down. I was never good for the people I loved.
I hung up the phone and slid down against the wall. I buried my head in my hands and I cried.
I really miss you.