Dedication Hour: Seven Letters to Someone Two Time Zones Away
Seven short dedications read in order, each one aimed at a person who is already waking up while the host is still on air.
TLB, 1:10 a.m., Dedication Hour. Cue the soft bell, then a long pause before I speak. Tonight's letters have one thing in common: every one of them is addressed to somebody in a place where it is already breakfast. I read them in the order they arrived, because I don't think anyone should be ranked by how well they write about longing. Letter one is four lines long and has no punctuation. I read it the way it was written.
Letters two and three are practical in a way I find unbearable. One asks whether the other person still sleeps on the left side of a bed that is now an ocean away. One lists what the sender can see from his own window: a tank farm, a church with a green roof, a billboard for a bank. Cue the piano record. While it plays I look at my own window, and the skyline offers its small trades, the tower with the red crown, the hotel sign that has been missing one letter all season.
Letters two and three are practical in a way I find unbearable.
Letter four is the shortest and I put a breath before it. It reads, in full, I am awake because you are not. Then I let the record run, because anything I say after a sentence like that is just noise. Two time zones is a strange distance. It is not far enough to be a different world, and not near enough to wave. Somebody is pouring coffee while you are turning off a lamp, and for one hour the two of you are almost synchronized.
Letters five and six are for the same person, sent by the same hand, twenty minutes apart. The second one apologizes for the first. I won't read the apology out. Some things are better left to the paper. Cue the sparse guitar piece, and notice how the building across the street has switched off every floor but one. That one lit window is doing the work of a whole skyline, and I think it is rooting for all of you.
The seventh letter is unsigned and has no address, only a time written in the corner: your morning, my midnight. I read it slowly and I leave the end open. If you are the person who finds yourself in it, you know. If you want to answer a letter like this one instead of just hearing it, Mia is on TheFriend as an AI character, a voice made for exactly these small hours. She won't pretend to be on the other side of the world. She'll just be awake with you. Cue the bell. Goodnight, wherever you are.
Some letters want an answer more than an audience, and TheFriend is where Mia, an AI character, can give them one in her own voice.
Continue on TheFriendMeet Mia: open Mia's profile on TheFriend.