save your voicemails

At the end of the work week, I found myself under my desk, resisting the urge to put my head between my knees, sipping electrolyte solution. For moments like these, I keep a pouch of this stuff in my bag, folded up into an Altoids tin along with some eye re-wetting drops, healing ointment, and a single zinc cough drop. I'm still not sure what had caused me to nearly collapse. I sat there for about half an hour and eventually decided to call a car. 

I stepped outside. It had just rained. The sun was setting but not yet gone, washes of warm light and cold shadow fell over the cars and the apartment buildings. A man and woman stood nearby, chattering loudly about why prediction betting should be regulated, and probably soft drinks along with them. They didn't seem to know each other that well; it was news to her that he used to be a libertarian. She clearly liked him. He was clearly unsure. 

2001

I put my headphones in and saw two missed calls, one from my optician in LA. Her name is Mimi, and she is also a DJ. Your voicemail box is full, said my phone, so I started to delete the messages, tens at a time, from robots and people I didn't recognize. I culled everything, save for a few here and there, and got all the way back to the beginning: mid-2022.

That can't be right, I thought. I checked my deleted messages. I checked my saved. 

I opened Voice Memos and searched "grampa." Where the fuck was my car? "Grandpa." Nothing. "Voicemail." Only one memo, 18 seconds long, labeled "Voicemail-105.m4a." Mar 17, 2023. I swiped away. It began to rain.

The voicemail I was looking for had been delivered in 2020. But what if I'd had the good sense to save it in March of 2023?

I went back to my memos, searched "voicemail" again, and this time I pressed play.

I wept. 

It rained. 

I pressed play again.

All in all, I had a good day at work today. A good week, in fact, and I'd like to tell you about it, save for the fact that I'm supposed to have gone to sleep hours ago, and I should save those thoughts for the morning. There are a lot of them. The reason I'm up is my friend — my cousin, in effect. I don't believe in platonic friendships unless they're like this one. He once told me I'm as sexual an object to him as a potted plant. We decided to go on a road trip this year, one where we each have some kind of question we want to answer. I told him I wanted to go find a bunch of Filipino people in middle America and ask them how they ended up there.