An Hour Long Call.

I hadn’t planned to call her. It wasn’t a conscious decision, more like a reflex, the kind you don’t think about until it’s already in motion. The clock on my desk said 7:12 PM when I dialed her number, expecting the usual five minutes of small talk—routine, polite, forgettable.

She answered on the third ring, her voice warm and familiar. “Hey, you called.”

“I did,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “Hope it’s a good time.”

“For you? Always.”

The way she said it, casually but with an undercurrent of sincerity, made me pause. She had this way of making you feel like the center of the universe without even trying. It was dangerous, that kind of power.

We started with the usual—work, the weather, the absurdity of traffic. She told me about a stray cat that had taken to lounging on her balcony, a scruffy little thing with mismatched eyes. “I think it’s adopted me,” she said, laughing softly.

I told her about my day, though it wasn’t much to talk about. Meetings that dragged on, a colleague’s bad joke, the way the evening light had turned the office windows golden for a fleeting moment. She listened, her occasional hums and chuckles making even my dullest anecdotes feel like stories worth telling.

Somewhere along the way, the conversation shifted. It always did with her.

“Do you ever think about what makes life beautiful?” she asked suddenly.

“Like sunsets and art and all that?” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Not just that,” she said. “The small things. The things we don’t notice until they’re gone.”

I thought about it for a moment, about how often I took her voice for granted, the way it wrapped around me like a favorite song. “Yeah,” I said finally. “I think I do.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was the kind of silence that felt full, like a pause between verses of a poem.

She started talking again, about a dream she’d had, about her favorite childhood memory, about the way she once spent an entire day watching the rain. And I listened, not just to her words but to the way she said them, the way her voice carried a quiet joy even when she talked about the bittersweet.

Time slipped away without either of us noticing. The clock on my desk read 8:14 PM by the time we hung up. What was supposed to be a quick call had turned into an hour-long conversation, the kind that leaves you feeling lighter and heavier all at once.

As I sat there, staring at the phone in my hand, I realized something I’d known all along but never put into words.

I wouldn’t say I loved her with every cell of my body. Cells die and get replaced; they’re fleeting, temporary. She wasn’t. She was more like my eyes—not something I needed to live, but something that made life infinitely more beautiful.

She was the lens through which the world seemed brighter, softer, more forgiving. And though she might never know it, every moment I spent with her, even over a phone call, felt like a gift.

An hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand six hundred seconds.

And yet, it wasn’t enough. It never would be.