I'm Listening

I'm posting from a vulnerable place today (hence no post yesterday). Between the election, the economy, job market, the state of the world, climate change, AI, and just about everything in between, its easy to feel helpless and, at times, even hopeless.

As a creative, when things are down for me I usually focus on creating something--which more often than not means writing. I haven't have the energy or enthusiasm to write, so I'm just posting one of my first short stories instead. This is a brief, dreamy departure from my usual design posts, but I'm a visual STORYTELLER so this still counts! Enjoy the quick read and let me know how it makes you feel. Even if you don't read it, share how you are feeling!?

THE CALL

Hello. Hello?

But he was greeted only by silence. The impulse struck him to hang up. It was the kind of pause that often proceeded a telephone solicitation, an automated call distributor switching over to the operator, leaving for a savvy customer that one narrow moment of escape before the onslaught began. He was not callous enough to hang up on solicitors himself; they were just doing a job. Instead he gave them the space and rare satisfaction to run their pitch right up to the finish line. In the awkward silence that invariably followed he never bought a thing and by the end they were usually more upset he hadn’t just hung up, as though being given the opportunity to do their job was a waste of time.?

The moment passed and still there was no sound.

Perhaps it was an operator’s first day on the job, they didn’t know how to use the equipment or there was a technical problem. Maybe it was a false connection, an electrical impulse randomly connecting his number with nothing at all. The silence lingered and so too did the phone, cradled snugly between his crooked head and pitched shoulder like a baby in her mother’s arms. White-washed in the light of a television, his hand wavered over the End Call button in suspended anticipation, waiting for the line to drop dead, or the prank to become apparent. Then his hand began drift, caught on a breeze of curiosity, settling over the remote.

Canned sit-com laughter faded into the stifling stillness of his room while on the other end of the phone the silence grew louder, becoming almost tangible. Though there was still no sound on the line, it was not the dead emptiness of an errant phone glitch, nor the ambient chatter of solicitors penned like pigs at a trough. This was different. He pressed his ear in harder as though the proximity would make a difference and unscrewed his eyes from the harsh light of the television. He gazed absently across the ceiling, down a wall and into the dark canopy of his carpet, focusing there into a world defined by the subtle variations of silence. Then he heard it:? a muffled movement, that brief fluctuation in volume of something passing over the mouthpiece.?

He was hooked now, sitting here at one end of a long and invisible wire inexorably connected to another person. Was this someone he knew, an old friend from the past who braved to call him now after all these absent years? Some distant relative he never knew spurned by familial obligation? Yet why now call and not speak? Or was it just another prank like all those before, somehow always striking him in the same vulnerable spot?

He shifted the phone to his other hand so he could stretch his arm and shimmied further into the creaking leather chair that knew his body better than any lover would. The sun bowed below his window drawing a long slow curtain of shadow up the wall. As the warm phone gradually melted into the deep contours of his ear he fell upon a discovery: the unmistakable sound of breathing! His imagination fired, he grappled to unearth it from the dark, to give the caller form in his mind. But before anything could be gleaned, the breathing stopped suddenly, as though aware it was being observed, and retreated back to the jungle of silence.?

The battle between them waged once again.?

Fine. He knew this could not go on much longer. If there was one thing he had befriended in life it was patience. Being alone for so long he had come to find no company more intimate, more trusting than his own, secure in the knowledge that no matter how lonely he was, he always had himself. In seclusion and silence he was safe from others who would misjudge him. Through the spite of being alone he had found the strength to persevere. And so it was he would lay in wait and listen, surrendering not a word, refusing them the satisfaction of retreat. He would force them to finish what they began.

Without the accompaniment of sound which made the television so palatable, the staccato of light grew sour on his eyes and was soon completely indigestible. Digging in his heels he flicked it off, the spot of light collapsed to black, inviting silence and darkness to settle upon him. As his body adjusted to the gloom he did not find himself in the suffocating stillness he had grown so used to, in the way a coffin was to a cadaver. Instead it felt like an open window at night, framing at once the expanding vastness of everything outside and the diminishing finiteness of everything within.?

He was both invigorated and exasperated by this inert contest, challenged as he was at his own game. The absence between them grew tense, as neither betrayed a sound, not the slightest movement or exhalation. Time passed in bouts. He barely afforded himself glances at the clock lest even the movement of his eyes betray his position. His body gradually hardened, the tingling of needles turning into nails, cementing him into place so that he could no longer move or even feel. The chair became his own skin and it spread out hard and flat to cover the walls and ceiling of his room. Soon he no longer even knew where his body stopped and the world began, or if there was any distinction at all. As he surrendered himself to the expanding vision he could feel the distance between them diminish, and their breathing fall in silent tandem, as though each was hiding behind the other’s breaths. He wondered if the person on the other end was going through the same metamorphosis and if between them they would merge the entire world into a single body.

When hours had passed without a sound, and self-awareness crawled back into his mind, he voted at last to declare himself victor, the caller by now asleep or gone. He had to come into himself again to separate his body from the world, the walls and chair, to find through sheer memory the now dead arm starved of circulation. With great effort he managed to tilt his body so that it peeled from the moist cocoon at his back, giving it the space to breath into a new shape. A groan escaped from his lips and before he could catch it he realized he had just exposed himself in the worst way possible, surrendering his most guarded secret—that he was still on the line, listening as he had been all night, entrenched in absolute silence with a complete stranger, just to be in the company someone else.?

He heard it then and he knew he was doomed--the dull rattle creeping towards him from the dark--his long absent nemesis, ridicule. But what fell upon him made his animosity evaporate with his sweat, leaving him cold with new understanding. The sound, unfurling like a white flag, was the sound of crying.?

He could not tell how old she was; in suffering all sounded the same. He understood though she was old enough to know pain as he did, and the comfort that came in silence. Her grief fell onto him like a lover collapsing in his arms. The cold air on his body crept into his eyes and put everything into a new focus. This war had been of his own making all along. Who she was or why she called was not important now; they were beyond that. Maybe she was just someone like him, tired of being alone. Giving himself away showed that her he was still there, listening, that he had not given up on her.?

He settled back into the strange configuration of the chair now alien to him, his body charged with new currency. He let her cry, never saying a thing, but letting her know this time that he was listening, as he had been all along. And when her tears stopped his began, and she listened to him, letting his tears fall into her ears. They were no longer two people separated by a thin wire, they were there two people sitting in the same empty room, holding each other in the dark.

As dawn cracked open the night sky, it cut them in two once again, putting each at their respective ends of the line. By the full rush of morning, the distance between them became indeterminable. Once again, each were on the phone with a stranger and the intimacy of their night fell into awkwardness. He thought of something to say, some way to thank her, but no words came. Words he realized did not belong. He just smiled with a sense of satisfaction, brushing his check against the phone, pleased that he heard her do the same. In a difficult effort to end the call, he shuffled the phone as a cue for her to hang up first--he could not be the one to end it—and waited, ear pressed hard against the hot wet plastic. She shuffled too,? pausing for a moment before the abrasive click severed their connection forever. But he was not sad, for he now he knew what he could not believe before. No matter how lonely he was, he would never be alone again.