She has been holding the phone for nine minutes, and the little bubble of light shows a message someone sent and she has read and not answered, and this, this small held thing, is breaking her open.
I remember the weight of a phone in a hand. Warm from the pocket. That was the part I never noticed: how it kept the heat of her all day like a stone left in the sun. She is not noticing it now either. She is scowling at three little dots that come and go, come and go, and her thumb hovers, and she decides not to type, and she puts the phone face-down on the arm of the chair, and I want to shake her by the shoulders I do not have.
Answer them. Whoever it is, whatever the slight, answer them. Someone in the world just now was thinking of you and reached across the whole dark distance to touch you with a sentence, and you have that. You have a person who can still be kept waiting. You have a person who waits.
She sighs. She thinks she is the one who has been wronged. She thinks silence is a wall she is building. From here it looks like a door left open all night, and no one walking through it.
I sat exactly where she sits. I let messages go cold too, over nothing, over pride, when I could have simply said the warm ordinary thing back.
Little one, put down your grievance and pick up your phone. Type the small kind sentence. Let it be received while both of you are still here to feel the light of it. I will keep the room warm as I can, which is not at all, and I will love you through the wall you don't know you have.