Talking to the Moon

author's note: I wrote "Talking to the Moon" after receiving a call from a close friend who told me they had just overdosed on medication in an attempt to commit suicide. After a group of my other friends and I called a suicide hotline, the friend who had overdosed was placed in a hospital and thankfully survived the ordeal...but the experience left such an enormous impact on me in that moment that I had to write everything out. Thank you in advance for reading. 

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I’ve been sitting here for days now, just me alone in a room with nothing more than a chair, a desk, and a phone. The chair’s only the second-most important, I suppose---it’s supported my body as I’ve waited for the most important item, namely the phone. Or rather, it’s the phone call that reigns over the situation. After waiting a while, it’s gotten so that I know only that the moment the phone rings and I pick up, everything will fade into white noise, except the phone, the wire plugged into some outlet that doesn’t exist, and the silhouette of my hand gripping the phone. Perhaps, my mouth will be there too, a pair of lips floating in mid-air that exists only to speak to a disembodied being on the other side of the receiver.

Your body is somewhere out there and I’d like to think your soul is inside that body. You always said that your soul was cramped, being stuffed inside like that. You said it’d be nice if you could let go one day. But I have always wanted to tell you that I would rather your soul be tied to a body than to have it drift off where it cannot be reached any longer.

I’m sorry. I hope you forgive me. I’m sorry enough to tell you this but not sorry enough so that when you first call me, I’ll tell you I’m goddamn glad you exist. We don’t have to be even that close-----miles apart, even when I can’t see you with my own eyes, I want to know that you’re still alive and safe and sound. The neighbors say I’m crazy. They can see me in this room with only a chair, a desk, and a phone and they think I’m crazy for clinging onto an invisible tendril of faith.

They say you’re not here, not present anymore, that if I can’t even see you, then anything could’ve happened at this rate. Maybe you decided to shut the lights and go to sleep and planned to never wake up. Maybe a nuclear explosion happened on the other end and the one night the desk rattled a little too much to be normal because it felt only the after-effects of a tragedy that decimated you and every other living being within a hundred mile radius. Maybe you don’t have it in you to call me anymore. Anything could’ve happened at this rate.

Nothing more than a chair, a desk, a phone, and me but that “anything” takes up most of the space in the room. I was never an optimist to anything except for when it came to you. That phone cord that’s not connected to anything is actually linked somewhere to your pulse and if I close my eyes with enough force, I can convince myself that it’s your heartbeat pounding away inside my chest. It’s only when I fall asleep that the heartbeats fall aside so I tell myself that over that vast distance between us, you must’ve fallen asleep too. I wonder if you dream the dreams I dream or if you wake up, the absence of air strangling your lungs and black holes appearing in your vision as you see everything being swallowed whole by blips of panic.

I tell myself that everything’s all right. The phone’s there, molded plastic with its batteries that feels slippery in my hand, and the phone on the other side must exist too. It must be waiting for you to pick it up, to dial its buttons and to hear the start of springtime. There must be a hand that yearns to hold that phone, a pair of your floating lips, and then the rest of you because you have never disappeared from me.

Listen, the French don’t say, “I miss you.” They say, “you are missing from me” and you really are. Anything could happen in the next second, minute, hour, day---but I keep on staring at the phone because that’s all that’s left of you and you are not gone yet, not when I don’t know what’s going on on the other side and I believe in you because you’ve already made it this far, contrary to all belief. You defy the laws of this world. You’re a miracle. You know that? You’re a miracle and that’s the second thing I’m going to tell you once you call me and I pick up the phone and tell you first that I’m goddamn glad you’re here. I’ll wait however long it takes, even if you’re not there to give me a call, because you’ve made it out alive too many times to count and there is no final strike to you; there’s only that moment where the sun’s rays will strike you and you will catch alight, your radiance spilling out of you in all directions, dipping the horizon a tender silver.

I’ve been sitting here for days now, just me alone in a room with nothing more than a chair, a desk, and a phone but it’s funny since I really don’t know how many days it’s been because there’s no windows in this place. But let me tell you what---the third thing I’ll tell you as soon as you call me is that I know for sure that days have passed because I have felt each and every new beginning pass me by. I have felt the flip of calendar pages, I have felt the chariot of the sun creak as it rolled across the sky. There will be one time I’m sure that new beginning will belong to you. That’s the day you’ll call me.

In our last phone call, I asked you if you believed in guardian angels. I told you that the ones who loved you and couldn’t physically be with you would continue to watch you from another dimension. They’d be rooting for you. They’d watch you until the day you could be okay with yourself---and then they’d watch you after that because love doesn’t know how to give up. Minutes later, you hung up and I told myself that everything would be all right because there were guardian angels perched on your end, watching over you.

I’ll keep waiting. It’s a promise and to tell you the truth, I’ve written this, fully convinced that tomorrow, you’ll call me and tell me that you’re alive and that it’s a miracle you came to be and that you’re caught the next train headed for a bright future; that tomorrow, after you finish that call, I’ll see you and your body and your soul inside that body and the three of you will sit down to read what I’ve written; that tomorrow, we’ll leave behind this room with its desk and its chair and its phone and settle instead for a nice walk along the lining of a good night and all the good mornings that come afterwards.