I Deleted His Number and Dialed It From Memory
You can erase a contact, but muscle memory keeps its own records.
I deleted Dev's number on a Sunday with witnesses, like a small execution. My sister held the wine, my best friend held my other hand, and I pressed delete while they cheered, and for eleven weeks I honestly believed that was the end of it.
Then I went to my grandmother's house in November, and her hallway still has the rotary phone.
It is heavy and black and smells faintly of her hand cream, and it sits on a lace doily that has been there since before my mother was born. As a child I loved that phone because dialing it felt like operating machinery, like being trusted with something. You put your finger in the hole and pulled the dial around to the stop and let it go, and the whole house heard the whirr of it coming back.
I was waiting for my grandmother to find her reading glasses so I could order her heart medication. I picked up the receiver to check for a dial tone.
And my hand dialed Dev.
I want to be precise about this, because eleven weeks of therapy language had convinced me I was doing well. I did not decide anything. I did not think of him.
My finger found the nine, the eight, the rest of it, seven pulls of the dial, each one whirring back like a little tide going out, and it was only at the last digit that my brain caught up with my hand and said, quietly... what are we doing.
By then it was ringing.
You can delete a person from your phone, but your hands keep their own directory, and grief, it turns out, has every extension memorized.
I stood in my grandmother's hallway with my heart going like a trapped bird, rehearsing the casual voice I would use, the laugh, the wrong number, so sorry.
The phone rang three times... Someone picked up.
“Hello?” A woman. Older, seventy maybe, with the kind of accent that puts a full stop after hello.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I think I have the wrong number. I was trying to reach Dev?”
There was a pause, and then the woman sighed, and it was not an annoyed sigh. It was the sigh of someone confirming a diagnosis.
“Love,” she said, “I got this number in August. You are the fourth person to ring it asking for that man.”
The fourth.
I sat down on my grandmother's telephone stool, which I had never once seen anyone sit on, and I asked the question I should not have asked. “The others. Were they, I mean, who were they?”
“Two women and one fella,” she said. “One of the women cried. I made tea and sat with the phone for twenty minutes. I didn't have the heart to hang up.” She paused. “He must be something, your Dev.”
He had changed his number, then. Not died, not vanished. Just moved on so cleanly that he had shed the number itself, the way a snake leaves its skin on a rock, and four of us were still out here dialing the skin.
Her name was Noreen. We talked for forty minutes. My grandmother found her glasses, saw my face, and went to put the kettle on without a word, because women of that generation can read a telephone call through a closed door.
I told Noreen the whole thing. The two years, the almost moving in together, the way he ended it in a text that opened with the word so. So, I've been thinking. I told her about the ceremonial deletion, the wine, the cheering, and how proud I had been, and how my own hand had just betrayed me in a hallway that smelled of lavender and 1974.
“That's not betrayal,” Noreen said. “That's just the body finishing a habit. I still reach for my husband's side of the bed and he's eight years gone. The reaching isn't the love. The reaching is just the groove the love wore.”
I have paid money to professionals who never gave me a sentence that good.
Here is what I did not tell Noreen, because I had not understood it yet. I had spent eleven weeks trying to move on after the breakup the way you would complete a project. I had the checklist. Delete the number, return the hoodie, mute the friends, take up running, be seen laughing in at least one photograph.
And the checklist worked, in the sense that scaffolding works. It held the building up...
It just was not the building.
The building got built later, and it got built strangely, and the rotary phone was the ground it broke on.
That night, at my grandmother's kitchen table, I wrote the number down on a piece of paper. The whole thing, every digit my hand knew better than my head did. It felt dangerous, like writing down a spell. Then, underneath it, because the paper was there and the house was quiet, I wrote what dialing it had felt like. The whirr of the dial coming back. The tide going out seven times. My finger knowing the way home to a house I was no longer welcome in.
It was the first thing I had written since school that was not an email. It was fifteen lines. It was terrible and it was mine.
I kept going. A friend sent me a prompt that started it all properly, something about writing to an object that outlived its purpose, and I wrote to the rotary phone, and then to the hoodie I had returned, and then, eventually, carefully, to Dev, in poems he will never see. Most of what I wrote circled memory, how the body keeps its own archive and files nothing under forget. Some of it, later, the better ones, were about healing, which I had always imagined as a door closing and which turned out to be more like a tide. Out seven times. Back six... Then out for good.
In February I posted one of the phone poems on a community wall for poets, because Noreen had said something on our second call, yes, there was a second call, and a third, that stuck under my skin like a splinter. She said, “Four strangers dialed a dead number for the same man, and none of you know each other. Somebody should write that down. That's a whole parish of heartbreak, that is.”
So I wrote it down. Strangers replied. One of them, I am fairly sure from the details, was the woman who cried on Noreen's phone in September. We did not name him. We did not need to.
I still call Noreen on the first Sunday of every month. I dial her on the rotary phone when I am at my grandmother's, because she likes the sound of it, the little whirring tide, and because I like what the dialing means now.
My hand is learning a new number.
It gets it wrong sometimes, still. Twice this year my finger has started the old pattern, the nine, the eight, the pull and release, and both times I have let it finish, listened to the three rings, and said hello to Noreen anyway when she answered, because it is her number now.
The groove is still there... Something better runs in it.
The love wore the groove. I get to choose what travels it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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