The hour before you wrote back

I had washed the same two plates three times. I had moved the chair into the light and then out of it. I had read the first paragraph of a book seven times without understanding it, and on the eighth attempt I gave up and put the book in a different room as if it had done something to me.

The phone was face down on the counter. I had decided I was not going to check it. I was going to read, I was going to make tea, I was going to be a person who could endure forty minutes of not knowing. I lasted nine.

When you wrote back it was four lines, and the second line was the one I had wanted, and the rest were a kindness around it. I read it twice and then I put the phone down again and I cried in a small efficient way, the way you cry when you have been holding something for a long time and are finally allowed to put it down.