Elegy for the Version of Me Who Answered the Phone

A poem about the people we stop being

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There was a version of me who picked up on the second ring, who never let a call go to voicemail out of some private superstition that missing someone, even by accident, was its own kind of small betrayal.

He answered mid-laugh, mid-meal, mid-sentence. He answered walking to nowhere in particular just to have somewhere to pace while he listened. He didn’t screen. He didn’t wait to see if it mattered enough. Everyone mattered enough.

I don’t know the day he died, that version of me — there was no funeral, no last ring left unanswered that I marked as the final one. He just got quieter, the way a room gets quieter when everyone slowly remembers they have somewhere else to be.

Now the phone rings and I watch it happen the way you’d watch weather through a window — something to be aware of, not necessarily responded to. I tell myself I’ll call back later. Later becomes a kind of religion I no longer practice, only believe in.

I don’t think I got colder. I think I got fuller — of other things, other people, other versions of urgent that crowded out the old one. But I miss him sometimes, the boy who thought every voice on the other end deserved to be met without hesitation.

He would have picked up for you. Whoever you are, reading this, missing someone who used to answer — he would have picked up. I’m sorry it’s not him holding the phone anymore.

It’s just me now, watching it ring, loving you in the quieter way that comes after — the way that means well and arrives late, if it arrives at all.

If this resonated, I write about the small deaths we live through and don’t get to grieve properly. Follow along for more.