She has been muted for six minutes and she does not know how free she is.
The little red slash sits over the microphone, and behind it she has become entirely herself again. She sighs, a real one, all the way from the bottom. She lets her face do the thing faces do when no one is watching, the slackening, the honest boredom. She spins a pen through her fingers.
She scratches an itch on her ankle with the other foot, that small clumsy grace only living animals bother with. On the screen the other faces keep talking, mouths moving in their bright little boxes, and she nods at the correct moments without hearing a word, and eats a cold fry from the container beside her keyboard, and this, all of this, is what I would trade the whole quiet dark for.
She thinks she is trapped. She checks the clock in the corner. She wants this to end.
I want to tell her: stay. Stay in the boring meeting. Feel the chair holding your weight. Feel the fry, salt and grease and the small animal pleasure of chewing. Feel your foot itch and be able to reach it. Notice that you are warm, that your heart is doing its plain reliable work under your sweater, that in four minutes someone will unmute you and need you and you will be needed.
She unmutes. She says, "Yeah, that works for me." Her voice fills the room, alive, a little tired.
Be tired for a long time yet, love. Reach every itch you get.
Eat the cold fries slowly.