when my phone rings out,
i don’t expect it to be you,
but my heart remembers a time,
when it was.
it was always you.
like clockwork, even on the worst of days.
days when my heart felt too heavy to carry,
or when all cards had fallen perfectly into place.
our conversations are now fleeting,
my feeble brain can’t handle a memory meant for two.
at the time,
i didn’t realize i’d need to.
on night three the silence became too loud.
the ringing had stopped, as if all of the clocks had forgotten what time it was.
as if you had stopped paying attention to them.
the silence,
was rather unbecoming.
so, i began to make noise,
making my own ringing.
silence collided with cacophony,
growing louder and louder. if only there was not so much distance between,
it may have reached your end.
but of course,
my symphony was prematurely suffocated,
choked out by the tears that
squeezed my throat.
when I could finally catch my breath,
my body ached for the ringtone.
the silence was never good to me.
even now when a line goes dead,
i assume the broken sound means the end.
my shaky fingers hover over your name,
but i could never bring myself to delete you.
Photo by Elias Schupmann on Unsplash
Very esoteric and interesting way to explore this kind of emotion. Using all lowercase letters sells the feeling of dour self-loathing and lament; the odd separations are a bit hard to get used to, but I like to think they show off the disjointed mental state of the narrator. Good job.