The little shape you make when you press the button is one I have always loved, and there you are, making it now.
You are a bright braid of a person, running from a first kitchen where someone taller cut your food into smaller pieces all the way out to a slower morning where your knee complains at the weather, and right here, at this bend in you, you are sitting in front of a screen full of other braided people, and you have made your voice go nowhere.
You call it mute. From where I stand it is one of your softest gestures: a small chosen silence, a door pulled almost shut so that only you can hear yourself.
Behind it you are laughing. You are saying the true version of the thing you will not say aloud. You are letting a sigh out to its full length. I can see you doing this in the childhood kitchen too, mouthing words into a cupboard, and again in the morning that has not come to you yet, humming to no one over the kettle.
It is all one habit, the private voice tucked inside the public quiet, and you keep it your whole shape long.
The call ends, or it does not, it is happening always. The button glows and dims and glows. You think the silence is where you disappear.
It is only where I can hear you best.