Somewhere between the summer ending and the cold arriving without fanfare
I made the decision not to make the decision—which is a separate affair
from cowardice, I want to be accurate, it’s the careful maintenance
of the unmade choice, the deliberate sustenance
of a particular silence that has its own weight now,
its own internal structure, its own way of allowing
the days to move without the rupture of the actual—
the call would break something. That’s the factual
assessment. I’ve preserved the unbroken thing.
I know the draft by now—the full rehearsed and undelivered, unheard
conversation I’ve been performing for the car for three months running.
I know exactly what I’d say. I know the stunning
specificity of how it goes—I’ve lived it in the dark interior
of the drive home every night, the superior
version of myself saying the true thing.
I held the phone one night—held the contact open, felt the weight
of eleven minutes sitting between me and the clean slate
of the thing finally said, the breach of the accumulated quiet
that has settled into something structural—I won’t deny it,
the silence is load-bearing at this point, it holds
the architecture of the mutual avoidance, the folds
of a relationship gone soft from disuse—
I held the phone forty seconds. Watched the screen go dark. Let loose
of nothing. Put it down. Watched something. Called it a night.
The name still sits there in the contacts, quietly alight
with everything I haven’t said and everything they haven’t either—
eleven minutes. The fever
of the almost-called runs low but doesn’t break.
I’ll call next week. I’ll call when I can take
the weight of the actual back into the present tense.
The call I’ve been putting off. The silence is immense.