Twelve seconds. That’s all.
Twelve seconds of a throat clearing first,
then the words—hey, call me back, I need to talk—
the rehearsed unrehearsed of it,
the way men speak when they’re about to say
something too large for the mouth,
something the throat cannot carry
and the machine will only flatten.
I never called him back.
I watched the notification glow,
thought tomorrow, thought later,
thought the things we think
when we don’t yet know
that time is not a bank, that it is a wick,
that what he needed wasn’t waiting.
He died the next day.
Alone.
And now the phone company sends their notice—
storage full, delete or upgrade.
I upgraded. Paid the fee.
Because this voicemail is the cage
where I keep his voice alive,
the twelve-second terrarium
where a dead man still has lungs,
still has breath, still has
the gravel and the warmth,
the familiar hum of someone breathing close.
Four hundred times I’ve played it
into the dark of this bedroom.
Four hundred times I’ve listened
for what lived beneath the words—
was he scared, was he in pain,
was this the leaning edge of goodbye
and I just didn’t recognize it
because I didn’t pick up the phone,
didn’t call him back,
didn’t save him with twelve seconds
I will never get back,
not in any bank,
not in any life
where time refunds its wick.
I pay whatever they ask.
I’ll keep paying.
Because the month runs out
and the server erases
and I cannot let those seconds go quiet,
cannot let his voice stop
being the last place on earth
where he still has breath,
still has courage,
still has the thing
he couldn’t say to me
only to a machine
that didn’t know a man was about to die.