Careless

The call, unanswered, goes straight to voice mail. From the living room I hear your voice, awkward, the words swimming haltingly from your mouth, strangely formal, leaving your name and number, as if I didn’t know.

We are recklessly casual when we are on the unlimited side of time, when we are free to ponder how to spend a summer afternoon, when we are bored with too much of the stuff:
The summer shadows begin to stretch, the sunlight sparkles on the lake; somewhere across the water a lawnmower quits, then starts again.

I am reading a book on the screened in porch when I hear the phone ring again. I am expecting no one, so I again ignore it, half drowsing in the innocence and arrogance of being fifteen years old.

Later – much later – decades having somehow fled, I feel time growing shorter and think back on summer days gone and calls unanswered.

Opportunities are far more fragile and fleeting than we once suspected. 

I think to go to the phone to place a call, but remember now that most of those numbers now no longer connect.