A cold cup of tea as metaphor. An airplane as metaphor. A man on a screen begging a woman not to change a word.
Sometimes a cup of tea is just a cup of tea that you forgot about because you were watching television and thinking about your life.
Outside, the city is doing its evening thing. Headlights on the 87. The airport a few miles south, swallowing planes one at a time. I can see one now, low and deliberate, nose tilted slightly upward in that posture of controlled surrender. It has passed the altitude below which there is no going back. It is, as the pilots say, committed.
I watch until it disappears behind a building. Then I pick up my phone. I open the voice recorder.
I was going to write a poem. The poem was going to be sad. They are all sad now. So instead I talk, and the talking becomes a recording, and the recording will become something else — text, maybe, or memory, or nothing — and the tea will stay cold on the desk, and the show will keep playing on the wall, and somewhere in North Carolina a server will hold the word single next to my name and it will be true, it will have been true for a long time, long before I pressed any button, long before the plane committed to its landing, back when the tea was still hot and I thought I had time.