what we talk about on the phone

on the country with two citizens.

three times a week, sometimes four, i call a woman who raised me alone in a country i no longer live in. the calls are mostly about nothing. the weather there. the weather here. what the neighbors are doing. whether the cat ate. whether i ate. she asks if i ate at least twice per call and i lie about it at least once, which we both know, and which is part of the call.

the calls last between forty minutes and an hour and a half. they have lasted, on average, about that long for ten years. if you do the math, which i have, the math is alarming. the math says i have spent more hours on the phone with my mother in the last decade than i have spent in the same room with her in the last twenty years. the math is the price of the life i chose, broken down by the minute.

her voice on the phone is slightly different than her voice in a room. it is higher, faster, more careful, more performed. she is doing, i think without knowing she is doing it, a small theatrical version of being okay, for me, across the ocean, so that i will not worry, so that i will not feel guilty, so that i will not, in the middle of whatever life i am building here, get on a plane. it is one of the bravest performances i know of. it is also the thing that makes the calls harder to bear than the silence would be. you can hear a person being brave for you. you can hear it in the small acoustic adjustments that they have made, over years, to spare you.

we don’t talk about the things we don’t talk about. we don’t talk about the wedding she went to last month, the one i saw in photographs three days later, where she is wearing a dress i have never seen and standing next to a cousin i have not seen in person since he was eleven. we don’t talk about the funeral two years ago that i could not, because of paperwork, attend. we don’t talk about the years i am missing of her, which she does not bring up because she is not the kind of woman who collects grievances, and which i do not bring up because if i bring it up i will have to do something about it, and i am not yet ready to do something about it.

what we talk about is the cat. the neighbors. the weather. whether i ate.

i used to think the calls were a substitute for being there. i thought of them as a worse version of presence, a downgrade, a way of staying in touch while i was busy being elsewhere. it took me a long time to understand that the calls are not a substitute for anything. the calls are their own country. a small one, with a population of two, that exists only between certain hours, that we have been building together, sentence by sentence, weather report by weather report, for as long as i have been gone.

what we have built on the phone is not a relationship in waiting. it is a relationship. the only one of its kind. she is, on the phone, somebody no one else gets to talk to. i am, on the phone, somebody i am not anywhere else. there is a person inside me who exists only between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning my time, three or four times a week, and that person is, i think, the person closest to the boy she actually raised.

i don’t always pick up.

sometimes she calls and i see her name and i let it ring, because i am tired, or because i am in the middle of something i have decided is important, or because i know the call will be forty minutes and i do not have forty minutes, or because i know the call will ask me to be the boy she raised and i do not, today, have him available. i call her back. i always call her back. but i carry, in a small private pocket of myself, a running tally of the calls i did not pick up the first time, and the tally is not nothing. the tally is what it costs to leave. the tally is the part nobody tells you about when you are twenty-five and thinking about your visa.

i don’t know what to do with this information. i don’t know if it is sad or beautiful or both at the same time, which is, i suspect, the answer to most questions worth asking.

i know that the day the phone calls end, which is a day that will come, in some specific year that has a specific number, i will not be able to get the calls back. i know that the calls are not preparation for some future visit that will make up for them. the calls are the visit. the visit is the calls. there is no other version.

most of what we love, we are loving in the wrong tense, and we find out which tense too late.

if you have a person who you talk to about nothing, do not, today, mistake the nothing for nothing. the weather is not the weather. the cat is not the cat. you are building a small country with two citizens, and the borders are the hours of the call, and the language is the things you are not saying, and the country has a closing date that you do not know.

pick up.