ONE LAST TEXT
I have run that number through my head more times than I could count in the six months since, twenty minutes, such a small, ordinary amount of time, the length of a sitcom episode, the length of a commute, and somehow inside those twenty minutes an entire unrecoverable stretch of my own life had happened to me and left no trace behind except a body that felt, the next morning, faintly, uncomfortably different in a way I didn't let myself examine too closely until weeks later when a different kind of different made itself undeniable.
I lay there in my bed now, seven months and a lifetime away from that basement, my hand resting against the curve of my stomach, and I tried one more time, the w