She sent me a message at six that just said thinking about you today,
and I put the phone face-down on the counter and walked slowly away,
because some messages require a moment of just standing with the weight,
before you type back something that sounds casual and calibrated and straight.
I’ve been carrying her in the back pocket of every Tuesday since the fall,
a low hum under every conversation in every conference hall,
and she sends these — not often, not never — these small specific flares,
that land in my chest like something falling clean down several stairs.
She called it thinking about you — not missing, not wanting, just the lighter thing,
which is its own kind of code that anybody fluent in this ring,
of half-said things and well-timed silences and looks across a room,
would know translates to something with more heat and more perfume.
I wrote back: same, which is either very cool or very cowardly depending,
on how you read the economy of what two people are defending,
and she sent a laughing emoji and then nothing for the rest of the day,
which I analyzed across approximately six meetings going my way.
We have this — whatever this is — that exists between the spoken things,
in the gap between the seeing each other and the next time something rings,
it’s maintained at low temperature, just above the freezing of neglect,
and it does this because we’re both too careful for what comes next.
I keep waiting for the message that drops the careful and just says it plain,
and I keep not being the one to send it, which is its own refrain,
and she keeps sending smoke signals into the morning of my week,
and I keep answering with same while thinking everything I don’t.