2:21.

She called. She sounded happy. Said she was sad. The terms were that basic. I understood. We didn’t have to agree to talk. Don’t have to be needy. Bored. Either. Today we reach out without really reaching. Still lecturing with chalk, professors drawl a line under Modernity. Classrooms are filled with accents. I rarely hear myself in anyone. We are stylized, while our ideas are erasable. This is nothing new. Does that alone make me feel worse? I am the only one that’s trying to be who I have never been before. He wrote “ha-ha” and mailed my story home. His best-selling novel is “Ha-Ha.” I could read into two letters and achieve zero proof that what I see is the same as what I think. This I could do for the rest of my life. I’d die overworked. And when they come to retrieve me, my mouth will be opened and pennies will go spilling. No one will have been watching. And I was never seen either. I’d die underpaid. I’d die without credit. This is profound. This is the truth. He wrote “ha-ha” and mailed my fiction home. My dad is an old man. And she was crying, but shared only the sound. The ones closest to us never age with us. It seems. Maybe we forget to look to our side. And when we are ready, and we do, we notice the size of our friends, the shape of father’s body, but never talk about their eyes, why we never saw them, how they made peace with the ground, and were quietly collecting time. Can you hear me? I couldn't ask. Too afraid. The answer is no. Maybe we never knew about life. And don’t know this till after. “It’s getting later all the time.” My family will never forgive me. It was the earliest she ever woke. They chewed bagels like two years prior. Now he always watched. She called this worry. Either way, I said sorry. And then said sorry for not being responsible for what she is going through. I think she said the truth doesn’t deserve an apology. But I could be wrong. She woke too early to see herself and instead saw him. The worried old man. Sure she could be sad that he had left her and now was back to follow her around with his eyes so to speak. But she wasn’t. I listened as she thought. She was sad that two years could make you old. And that she couldn’t add cream to her coffee. He was worried that it was the only thing she hadn’t finished. And she was sad that this is what worried him.