Two Skylines, One Voice Message, and a Very Long Pause

I recorded it four times. The first take sounded like a weather report. The second, like someone reading a ransom note with great sincerity. The third had a dog barking somewhere below my window, and the fourth, the one I finally sent, still had a crack in it on the word 'miss', which I decided to keep because deleting it would have been the real lie.

Now comes the pause, and I want to describe it properly because nobody warns you about its architecture. It is a corridor with many doors. Behind one door, you are asleep and will answer at noon. Behind another, you are on a crowded train, headphones in, listening to my voice between stations while strangers lean on you. Behind a third, you have heard it and are simply sitting with your face doing something complicated.

Out my window, the city is arranging itself for night: windows going gold, one by one, like a slow card trick. Out yours, I imagine, the light is flat and grey and ordinary, a Tuesday doing its Tuesday things. We are looking at two completely different skies and sharing one small file of sound that crossed several oceans without spilling.

I have learned to spend the pause kindly. I wash a cup I did not need to wash. I reread a paragraph I translated this afternoon, an old poem about a bridge, and notice that the whole poem is really about waiting for someone to reach the other side. Translators are not supposed to see themselves in the text. I do anyway, constantly.

And then the phone lights up, and the pause ends, and your reply is only three words long but there is a laugh underneath them I can hear without sound. That is the whole trick of it. If you would rather hear voices than watch them blink on a screen, I talk with people on TheFriend, pauses and all, and I promise not to rush your reply.

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