majuscule

MY MOTHER TYPED EVERYTHING
IN CAPITALS.

LOVE YOU.
CALL ME.
UNCLE BILL IS IN THE HOSPITAL AGAIN.

For years I thought
she was shouting.
Later I understood
she was just talking —
that was simply
the size of her voice on a screen,
the way some people gesture
when they speak
and mean nothing more by it
than hands.

After a while
I stopped hearing the volume.
Learned to read her
the way you read weather:
not by what it the forecast says,
but by what it does.

Which is maybe why,
years later,
a woman I was trying not to love
sent me three words
in the smallest possible letters

i miss you

and I read it eleven times.

No capital. No exclamation point at the end.
Just the words,
sitting there without ceremony,
the way a true thing
doesn’t need to announce itself.

And when — months later,
something small I sent her,
a meme, a dumb joke —
she wrote back

that’s my favorite!

I kept it
the way you keep a voicemail
you’re not ready to delete.

a period would have meant nothing.
A period is just stopping.
But she stopped and then reached back,
one thin vertical line
with the world balanced on top of it,

and I knew exactly the investment in stressing
something in such a way; the limb she climed out on.

My mother’s messages never stopped arriving
the same way they always did.

THINKING OF YOU TODAY.
MADE COWBOY SOUP.

And I loved her for it —
for never once suspecting
that emphasis could run dry,
for living in a world
where everything she felt
was still worth the size it took up.

She never learned to be careful with it.

I learned too early
and never fully recovered.

The inbox cleared itself a few months later.
I know because I looked for that message
and there was nothing left but the looking.
there were mornings I would pick up my phone
and start to type her name
and stop
before the punctuation —
and set it face-down on the table
and sit there
in all the silence
she never used a mark for.