The phone lit up at ten past nine with everything you had,
a paragraph of raw nerve endings, every line gone mad
with the specific desperation of a person going under,
the kind of text that splits the quiet open like thunder,
I read it once, I read it twice, I set the phone face down,
I reached across the cushion for the remote and found the sound.
The television asked me nothing, which I needed it to do,
it offered me a precinct drama and I took the offer too,
the blue light of the screen replacing the blue light of your need,
two different kinds of transmission, one I chose to heed.
Left on read, left on read,
I saw the whole damn paragraph, I watched the whole thing bleed,
two blue checks, the timestamp sitting honest on the screen,
left on read, left on read, and the television’s clean,
no one on the television needs a thing from me tonight,
left on read, left on read, I turned up the light.
I’m not a monster – let me make that clear before you judge,
I feel the weight of what you sent, I felt the whole thing shudge
against the place in me where empathy lives when it’s not sleeping,
but empathy’s expensive and I’m not in the mood for keeping
the kind of vigil your paragraph required from a witness,
the kind of presence that would cost me my last hour of stillness.
The precinct drama had a body and a detective on a pier,
it had a woman with a secret and a winter atmosphere,
it had nothing that would ask me to locate the correct words,
to perform the careful triage that your message so deserves,
and I am tired in the specific, structural, cellular way
of a man who has been present for too many other people’s days.
Left on read, left on read,
I saw the whole damn paragraph, I watched the whole thing bleed,
two blue checks, the timestamp sitting honest on the screen,
left on read, left on read, and the television’s clean,
no one on the television needs a thing from me tonight,
left on read, left on read, I turned up the light.
The paragraph is still there at commercial break, I check,
you haven’t sent a follow-up, which means you’re either wrecked
and waiting in the specific silence of a person who has sent
the unguarded version of themselves and now sits with the scent
of their own exposure in the room, or you’ve moved on to someone
who answered, who performed the duty I’ve undone,
who typed the careful response the moment gave permission for,
who is now the person standing on your side of the door.
I think about typing something – I think about it hard –
I think about the distance between your yard and my yard,
between the person that I’d need to be to answer what you sent
and the person that I am at ten past nine, too spent
to be anything but horizontal under borrowed television light,
choosing the precinct drama, choosing quiet, choosing night.
Left on read, left on read,
I saw the whole damn paragraph, I watched the whole thing bleed,
two blue checks, the timestamp sitting honest on the screen,
left on read, left on read, and the television’s clean,
no one on the television needs a thing from me tonight,
left on read, left on read, I turned up the light.
The show ends and the credits roll and I turn the phone back over,
the paragraph is still there glowing, patient, a leftover
emergency I didn’t process, a need I didn’t meet,
the timestamp now an hour old, the read receipt complete,
and I sit with the small cold fact of what I chose to do,
not guilt exactly, more the low specific residue
of a man who saw the signal and declined to be the tower,
who watched the paragraph illuminate and let it flower
into unanswered silence in the archive of your phone,
who chose the television and the quiet and the alone,
and who will think about this in the six AM dark
when the body wakes before the mind
and the mind finds what the body knew – the things we leave behind
are never really left, they just wait in the read receipt’s blue light,
patient as a paragraph, as honest, and as bright.