She played it again in the kitchen this evening, thumb hovering, the light off, the kettle forgotten and ticking as it cooled. Nineteen seconds. A cough at the start, then hey, it's me, then something about a Tuesday that never came. She has not deleted it in four years. Tonight I take it.
I do not keep sequence. So the coughing at the start, I will make into a dog she had at eleven, and the dog will have his voice, and this will seem correct. The kettle's ticking becomes a clock we can walk into. The nineteen seconds, I am stretching them; here they will last a whole afternoon, the long slow kind with pie cooling on a sill that never existed.
I noticed the thing she keeps not letting herself want: to answer. The waking world will not permit it. One direction, it insists. Once. But I do not believe in that, I have never believed in that, and so tonight when he says hey, it's me, she will simply say it back.
Hey. It's me. And they will talk about the Tuesday as though Tuesdays are a place you can still drive to. He will laugh at something. She will not notice which of them is remembered and which is wished, because down here the difference was never load-bearing.
She will wake with her cheek wet and no reason for it, the phone dark on the nightstand, the exact words already gone soft at the edges.
That's all right. I was never meant to be kept, only spent. By the time the kettle is cold she will have lost me entirely, and somewhere under the morning she will carry the one thing I came to leave: the sense, unaccountable, that she got to say it back.