Operator Unavailable

There’s a man running all the red lights on James Street and he’s not going to stop before he gets to me, and I want you to know before I die, that I forgive you, and I forgave you on a Tuesday in March in a parking lot outside a CVS, eating a ham-and-brie sandwich sliced with honey mustard in between each layer, the way you used to like it, and it only cost me five dollars and twenty-nine cents because I found a crumpled up coupon stuffed in between the cushions of my car. You were out with Blue-Sally every Thursday like it was etched into the scripture, and I could never quite find that line, Blue-Sally with the gold anklet and a laugh that carried itself through the holes in our screen doors, and we called her Blue-Sally because she always wore blue jeans and pronounced “blue” with a faux-french accent, like it was “blow.” Blue-Sally whose name I learned before I learned what a metaphor was, because mom would say it under her breath while doing dishes — Blue-Sally, Blue-Sally — like a prayer and like she was god, and I was ten, and you had the need to drown in a color that wasn’t us. Dani said I loved like I was already leaving, and I said, baby, you’ll never guess who I learned that from, and she didn’t laugh because she hadn’t ever met you but I think she would’ve, if she did, and he said I never unpacked my overnight bag all the way — kept my toothbrush in the side pocket even after six months, even though I told her there was a perfectly good toothbrush at my house, and then she left in the morning, and I know that because I counted her steps to the door — fourteen — the way I used to count the nights by the sound of mom turning the deadbolt twice. I’m telling you this because there’s a man running all the red lights on Johnson Avenue and that man is me, and I’m hoping that you’ll pick up the phone for once in your life so I can tell you that maybe I don’t forgive you, and that I wish you’d never met fucking Blue-Sally, but then again you probably would’ve met an Orange-Sophia or a Fuchsia-Gloria and forgotten about us anyway. 

And I’m on the line until everything goes black and I think, he really never pick up the phone.