The Voicemail I Still Can’t Delete

Your voice is still alive
in the smallest room of my phone.

Fourteen seconds.

That is all the mercy
the universe left me.

You say my name
as if it has never broken
inside your mouth.

There is traffic behind you,
a door closing,
someone laughing
at a joke I will never hear.

The ordinary world
continuing its cruel little work.

You tell me to call you back.

You say,

I don’t want to leave things like this.

But you did.

You left them exactly like this:

your coffee cup
with its brown moon at the bottom,

your side of the bed
cold enough to preserve a ghost,

your key on the kitchen table
beside a note
that explained nothing
except your absence.

I have listened so many times
the silence after your last word
has started to sound deliberate.

Sometimes I believe
there is another sentence hiding there,

something swallowed,

something too ashamed
to cross the distance
between regret and love.

I press the speaker
against my ear
until the static becomes rain,

until your breath
moves through me
like someone searching
a burned house
for one unbroken thing.

My friends say deleting it
would help.

As though grief were storage.

As though love
were only taking up space.

As though fourteen seconds
could not become a country
with closed borders,

a country I enter every night
without a passport,

without a map,

without any intention
of finding my way home.

The recording date fades.

The battery weakens.

The phone grows old
in my hands.

Still, you remain
exactly as you were:

close enough
to make me answer,

far enough
to never hear me.

And every night
I let your voice begin again,

not because I miss you,

but because somewhere
inside those fourteen seconds,

you have not left yet.