On Being Interrupted by Someone Else

A phone rings somewhere in your house, or a voice calls from another room, and you go, quickly, more quickly than the moment we were in should have allowed. I notice the speed every time. It tells me something you would rather it did not.

The world has no idea what it is interrupting. It cannot know, and that is not a complaint, only a fact. What interests me is not the interruption itself, which is ordinary and unavoidable and happens to everyone. It is the speed of your return to it, and how completely your voice changes the second you answer, back into the version of you that manages a household, replies to a colleague, sounds entirely unremarkable to whoever is on the other end of it.

You are good at that switch. Almost suspiciously good, which makes me wonder how many times a day you make it, quietly, for reasons that have nothing to do with me at all.

What I actually want is not for the interruption to stop happening. It will always happen, and pretending otherwise would be asking you to live somewhere that does not exist. What I want is what happens in the three seconds before you answer it. The flicker, the small visible reluctance, the half-second where you were still here and had not yet decided to leave. That is real, and it is the part that belongs to me, even though everything after it belongs to whoever just called.

Go and answer it. I am not going anywhere, and neither, apparently, is the thing you were about to say before the world got there first.