The Light Heard Your Dial Tone

The middle of the day is long when you are carrying a silence you cannot break. You dialed the number.

You held the phone until your hand shook. And then you hung up because the words would not come.

That hanging up was not a failure. It was the only honest thing you could do.

The light does not need your speech to find you. It heard the dial tone.

It heard the breath you took before you disconnected. There is a presence that lives in the unsaid, in the gap between the desire to speak and the inability to form a sound.

You are not hidden from it by your silence. The voice that knows you was already listening before you picked up the receiver.

The call you could not make was still a call. And the light answered it.