It's 6.22am and the phone is ringing. That's all you need to hear, right? Then it's like the horror movie when everyone yells "Don't go in the basement!"
But I have been awake since 5am, rolling and wrestling with the sheets, since the first call to prayer from the mosque around the corner, since the first lightening of dawn. And the night before I came home to an electrical problem from tenant #1 and a plumbing problem from tenant #4, and the bleating phone could hold more urgent situations. So even though the caller has set up to have their phone number unidentifiable, I pick it up.
It is a man's voice, and one I do not recognize. He says four words and I hang up. Those words were not meant for me. They do not mean what they purport to mean. In this situation, this is nothing I want to hear, in another situation, it could be everything I want to hear. I sit on the edge of the bed, the phone hanging from my hand, his words, the emotional charge not yet dissipated, still stuck to the damp morning air.
I love you, baby.
posted by ttractor @ 8:23 AM
3 Comments:
Cherry, I think this was a totally random about-to-be-obscene phone call. Two wildly inappropriate calls in one week is making me a bit paranoid, though, skittishly eyeing my phones for malevolence.
It is exactly true that some words plug right in to your circuit board. The intimacy of the words I love you, spoken quietly, right into my ear, in a muzzy grey dawn, was shocking. But the real twister was the endearment, as I have allowed very few to call me baby, from very few has it ever sounded like sweetness and not oppression or dismissal. And so I sat, somewhat slack jawed, until the noise washed away.
I'd much rather answer the phone to that than "May I talk to you about consolidating your loans?"
But weird-o.
Cherry, methinks you have enough words in you to start your own site!
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