on fourteen seconds

14 seconds. that’s how long your voice note was.

i’m not even sure when we started sending voice notes. it’s like we had just decided, at some point, that everyone was doing it, and so we should try. suddenly it became normal to hear each other’s voices in these rudimentary recordings, tiny time capsules sent every so often from opposite ends of the coast.

it arrived around noon, california time. maybe you were on your lunch break. maybe you were in the office between meetings. i wonder if you thought about what you were going to say or if you just happened to hit record. i wonder if you remembered before your calendar did.

am i still in your calendar?

i heard you smiling. even over the phone, i could always tell when you were smiling. the timbre of your voice—your consonants softening at the edges, your vowels rounded out.

14 seconds. you wished me happy birthday. you wished me well. you said you hoped i had a good day.

14 seconds. everything to one person, nothing to another. time is not as fixed or as impartial as we like to think. seconds can hold a lifetime, minutes can carry a history, hours can contain an entire world.

but no one will ever know. no one will ever know what 14 seconds could mean except for the two people who lived inside them. no one ever will know except us.

i was sick last week. the kind where you can barely leave bed, the kind where your entire existence contracts to four walls and the popcorn ceiling overhead. there is a particular loneliness you experience with physical pain. people can bring you soup, text and ask how you are, but no one can actually feel the pain inside your body. no matter how precisely you describe the ache—its location, its quality, whether it’s sharp or dull or radiating—they cannot enter it. and you realize, though you’re surrounded by people who care about you, you are very much alone.

love is not so different; it’s a singular experience no one outside of it can truly enter. the only exception here, however, is that you’re not alone. love is an island—just one with two people on it.

when you’re in a relationship, you’re two people on the same ride, sharing the same ascents, lurches, and drops. to everyone else, however, it’s merely a story they hear secondhand. you can give them the chronology: the first dm, the first dinner, the first kiss. you can recount, in vivid detail, the trip you both took to the adirondacks that weekend in may. but ultimately, they weren’t there. knowing will never be the same as experiencing. they’ll never understand your hand in her hair, the look in his eyes, the way they called your name.

like that night in london.

winter pressing at the windows. christmas lights looped through leicester square. the cacophony of tourists rising from the street below. the airbnb had almost no lighting—whether by design or oversight, i couldn’t say—so the flat existed mostly in darkness and shadows. i lit a candle i’d bought near covent garden; everything began to smell faintly of orange blossom and musk.

we put music on. you had brought one of those mini sonos speakers from home, which struck me as both absurd and entirely like you. i don’t remember when we started to dance. fast, slow, eyes open, then closed; we laughed at everything and nothing at all. outside, the city was freezing; inside, two bodies, pressed together, warm and completely in love. nothing else mattered.

no one will know what that felt like. that night in london. the tragedy and beauty of love is that it forever remains a private archive, inaccessible to everyone but the two people who built it.

years have passed since then. we’re different people now. we’ve grown up, moved on, chased new dreams, found new loves. i now have the wisdom to know we weren’t meant to be. not because we didn’t love each other, we really did, but because loving someone isn’t the same as building a life with them.

still—for all of it, for every moment—i’m grateful. that i loved you and was loved by you.

14 seconds. i’m not sad. i don’t long for what was. we are no longer in love, in that way. and that’s okay.

but those 14 seconds are ours. and no one else will ever know.