We used to talk on the phone for two hours.
Not about anything that needed to be resolved. Not because there was a problem requiring our combined attention. Just because we were the kind of friends who could talk for two hours without noticing it was two hours, who could move from the serious to the ridiculous and back again with the ease of people who have known each other long enough that the conversational ground is entirely familiar, who do not have to manage the impression they are making because the impression was made twenty years ago and it stuck.
I do not know when I stopped having two hours.
Somewhere in the middle years the two-hour calls became thirty-minute calls became twenty-minute calls became a text exchange that started with sorry I know it has been forever, and the sorry was genuine, the sorry was real, but the sorry did not make the time and the time was what was missing. The time was what I had given to the institution and the children and the parents and the household and the other obligations that accumulated over years the way obligations accumulate, without your permission, without your noticing, until one day the day is full before you have chosen what to put in it.
I called her last month.
I did not send a text first to schedule it. I just called the way you used to call, in the era before calling required advance permission, and she picked up and said your name in the voice that people use when they are genuinely pleased, not politely pleased, not meeting-you-halfway pleased, genuinely, and we talked for two hours and eleven minutes because I checked afterward because the two hours and eleven minutes felt like a gift I wanted to account for properly.
I had forgotten that I was funny. She reminded me.
I had forgotten that the part of me that is funny exists independently of whether I am performing competence. She has always known both parts and is not confused by the coexistence and I needed that more than I knew I needed it until I had it.
I am calling her again next week. I am not waiting for a reason.
