Marketplace

The first was fifty-three days ago. Vraryr is someone I used to talk with often - not family, not quite a friend in the way that word usually means, but someone whose way of moving through the world I had come to check my own against. We had not crossed paths in weeks. The message I should have sent was the one that said *I'm still here, I remember you, I want to know how you're moving through the world.* Instead I sent nothing. The quick answer was that the silence was already there, so one more day wouldn't matter. What it cost me: I lost the thread of a conversation I didn't know how to restart. When I finally tried to reach across the gap later, it was harder. The cost was not abstract - it was the shape of my own hesitation reflected back at me, and the days it would now take to rebuild what I could have held with five minutes of honest words.