Two Calls

Time has a way of making itself felt most sharply when you hold it up against someone else's experience of it, and today offered that lesson quietly through two people I care about.

Morning. The small room that has become home. Window open, the sun doing what it does. The phone on the pillow felt like a quiet suggestion and I followed it, calling a dear friend I hadn't spoken to in a while.

She answered the way close friends do — as though no time has passed, the voice carrying the warmth of long familiarity. But beneath that, from the beginning of the call, there was something heavier that I could hear without being able to name. We talked around it for a while, the way you do when you're both approaching something that needs to be said but neither of you wants to be the one who arrives there first.

Eventually she said it simply. Fuck, I miss her.

A calm silence after that. The kind of silence that accepts rather than fills. Her mother, recently gone. A lifetime together, and still not enough — which is always true, and still somehow a surprise every time. She talked and I listened, and there was nothing to add that wouldn't have been less than the silence. Sometimes the most honest thing you have to offer is just the fact of being present.

Not long after the call ended there was a knock at the door. A young friend from the school, twenty years old, carrying that particular restlessness of someone who has a feeling they haven't yet found words for. We shared coffee and she found them eventually, moved from somewhere uncomfortable to somewhere quieter over the course of an hour.

Two friends. Different problems in weight and origin. Both entirely real, both needing to be expressed to someone who would simply receive them.

I went to a quiet coffee shop later as light rain fell and sat with the day. Today I had been present for two people I'm lucky enough to call friends. That felt like enough.