Blueprint for Absence
Sunday, her apartment is a clean diagram: shoes by the door facing outward, keys already turned toward leaving, two mugs on the rack though she always reaches for the chipped one. When the phone hums, she lets it finish its thought on the table. You free later? A kind question from a kind person.
She drafts yes and watches it tremble in the text box, then edits to maybe, then to rain check? The words look like furniture pushed against the walls to make an exit path. She saves none of them. The message thread stays unsent, a room with the light on that no one enters.
She wants love the way a locked door wants a visitor: sincerely, with a chain installed. She knows the name for it—avoidant—but knowing is only a label on a switch she still can’t flip. “I ruin things,” she thinks, not as drama but as math: distance multiplied by time equals safety divided by ache. It never balances.
The kettle ticks toward boil. She sets another place at the table—out of habit, out of hope, she can’t tell—and folds a napkin for a guest who’s only a rumor. She imagines what she’d say if she answered: come over, I’ll make something simple, you can tell me that story about your sister again and this time I’ll stay for the middle. The script warms her hands. She doesn’t perform it.
Instead, she opens Notes and pastes I want to see you into a file called unsent. She thinks of all the small precautions she’s built: aisle seats, separate checks, a habit of learning favorite songs but not birthdays. Lonely by design, she thinks, then hates the neatness of the phrase. Designs are supposed to hold.
Steam kisses the window and writes her a question mark. She answers it by doing the dishes, the ones she dirtied making breakfast for one and setting the second fork anyway. When the phone hums again, she flips it face down as if closing an eye. The quiet that follows is not empty; it’s full of her own handwriting.
She knows she’s the author of this ache. She even recognizes her signature—small, tidy, lower right—at the bottom of the page she’s living. She dries the chipped mug, returns it to the rack, and promises herself that next time she’ll send yes. She believes it for the span of a cooling kettle.
Outside, someone laughs in the hall. The laugh travels past her door like weather. She stands still and lets it. She is a door that longs for knocking and keeps the chain on anyway.
