I reach the friend I lost track of

We are talking again, and it took about four seconds to stop being awkward. Four seconds. I am going to remember that number the next time I let something go quiet, because four seconds is the thing I was so afraid of that I avoided it for two years. Two years against four seconds is not a trade anybody would make on purpose. I made it by default, which is how these trades always get made. It was never a rupture. It was drift, and drift is far easier to reverse than anybody believes while they are inside it.

There is a voice I have not heard in a long time saying my name in the ordinary way. Nothing has to be explained. We are already three subjects in and not one of them was the gap. Somebody's dog is barking in the background on their side and they apologize for it, and that is the most normal thing that has happened to me all week.

Nothing happened between us. That is somehow worse, because there is no story to point at and no injury to repair. I let something good go quiet through pure inattention, and then the silence itself got embarrassing, and the embarrassment became the reason for more silence. Nobody keeps score on this the way I imagined they must be. I had assigned them a running tally they were never keeping, and then treated my own invention as a reason not to call. That is a closed loop with no exit built into it, and it will run until somebody interrupts it from the outside.

The other person was almost certainly waiting for exactly the same two sentences. That is the part that should be obvious and never is, because I can only see my own side of the silence, and mine looks like guilt while theirs looks like indifference. It is not indifference. It is the identical loop running in a different house, with the same thought in it. Somebody has to go first, and going first costs nothing except being briefly the one who appeared to care more. That has never once been a real cost. It only looks like one from this side of the message.

So I send two sentences. I have been thinking about you. I would like to catch up. No excuse and no apology for the gap, because an apology makes the gap the subject of the conversation, and the gap is not the subject. The friendship is the subject. I am not going to explain where I have been for two years. Nobody has ever wanted that explanation.

Back in touch. It was never as far gone as the silence made it look, and it never is.