I’ve Been Meaning to Call

Forgive me, friend, I’ve been meaning to call. It’s been so long now you must think I’m avoiding you.

I am not avoiding you. I think about you often. I do. I thought about you this morning on my way to work. The snow in the fields made me think of you, the frost on the trees. Maybe it was the way the sun came up, etching the world into shape. Maybe it was the contemplative quiet of early morning highways across America. Maybe it was the longing in the grayness of dawn, the belief something better is coming.

I thought about you all last week as well, when the weather turned. The snow in the fields, remember? It’s been cold for what seems like forever, and I guess that was my failing. I like to sit outside in the sunshine when we talk, and it’s been too cold. Windy as well. Very windy.

I’ve been meaning to text. I’ve been meaning to answer that email. I’ve been meaning to respond to your post, I’ve been meaning to tell you I read that last thing you wrote, I’ve been meaning to send you this funny thing I saw on Youtube. (I’m too old for TikTok. You know that, and if you didn’t know that, well, I’ve been meaning to tell you.)

Maybe it really is the weather. Maybe it’s the way the wind is blowing. I only know I meant to call my stepfather in the weeks before he died unexpectedly. I meant to ask after his health. I meant to ask about the guitar he bought, the thing I thought might bring him out of the funk he was in. I meant to bring a little light into his world but before I could do it his light left this world because it turned out the funk was fucking cancer.

So say I got a little lost. I forgot what was important in the face of all the things the world says are important—work and bills and money, those things that will never outlast you, like love. I’ve focused on folly. On finding my way in the world when everyone with any sense knows that the world fights you at every turn. There’s death and disease and men with too much power. There’s too much talking and not enough listening. Too many memes. Too many hot takes on social media and not enough cooler heads in congress.

Still, I meant to call you. Friend. Father. Brother. Mom. I meant to get to know you again, because it seems the world has torn us apart. We move away to find our way and our way often keeps taking us further away. Time slips by in the grind as we bend our backs to the wheel. The days fly by like wild horses over the hills. We grow older and more contemplative and the time we’re looking back toward grows ever further away.

So I’m sorry. It’s been so long now. Far longer now than we were ever together and I’m not sure I know how to cross that gulf or narrow that gap and so it hangs uselessly in space like the words we can’t bring ourselves to say to one another.

But I have been thinking about you. I need you to know this. I think of my stepfather every time I tune my guitar. I wonder what music he might have made if he had lived a little longer to make it. I imagine myself showing him a few chords. Saying something about old dogs, and new tricks.

I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the guitar. I can barely even talk about it, and friend, when I don’t call, it’s always because of a similar reason. I don’t think he ever even tuned it, and things like that get stuck in my throat, like some small bone I can’t worry away. Some dark hole I’ve gone down, trying to find the light, or at least where the light leaks in.

But I’ve been thinking about light again, friend. I’ve been thinking about warmer weather. Soon the snow will be gone. It’ll get light a little sooner and the light will stay a little longer, chasing back the long night. The rains will come, and the wind, but in spring the rain and wind are renewing. Revitalizing, reinvigorating. The coming storms may tear the limbs from the trees, but the trees will survive.

Like you and me, they’ll be stronger.

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Note:

Friends and followers: very soon I am going to start posting fiction for paid subscribers. If you are able, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get access to all archives, notes (when I send them), and now fiction. I am going to start by sharing excerpts from a collection of short stories set in an old tuberculosis sanitorium now converted to a home for the intellectually disabled. Those of you who have read my first essay collection, and the essay “Girl on the Third Floor,” may remember this is a very real place in my hometown in Arkansas.

(The phone I am going to call you on)