I have been saving this all day: the moment your thumb stopped over the glowing rectangle, the little word *Delivered* refusing to become *Read*, and then, worse, becoming it. You put the phone face-down on the counter like burying something. Good. I will need that.
Tonight the phone will be a pond in a field you almost remember, and the message will be a stone you already threw, sinking, sinking, never touching bottom, and you will lean over the water waiting for it to land with the strange patience only I can give you. The three gray dots will come back.
Of course they will. Down here I run the dots. They will bloom into a heron who says your name in your mother's voice, and you will not find this odd, because I have quietly removed the part of you that finds things odd.
The unanswered thing you needed, the *are we okay*, will get answered by two a.m., though not in words. It will arrive as a warm room you have been in before but cannot place, a door left open exactly the width of an invitation. I cannot make the real person write back.
I am not that kind of magic. But I can let you feel, for six or seven minutes of pond-time, that you were not too much, that the silence was weather and not a verdict.
The stone will surface as a fish. The fish will be laughing, kindly, at nothing.
Then the light will come in gray at the window and pull the pond up through the ceiling, and the heron, and the open door, and me. You will wake holding a feeling with no story attached to it, softer than the one you fell asleep with. You will not remember I did that.
I never mind.