There’s a black rotary phone sitting on my desk. No cord. No dial tone. No one on the other end. Just the slow, deliberate weight of it. The kind of phone that makes you mean it—where every number takes effort, every call feels like a commitment. I have labeled it as The Never Too Late Line.
I haven’t hung it on the porch yet, but I will. Soon. It’ll be a place to speak your goodbyes that were left unsaid, your apologies that came too late to land, the “I love yous” and “I miss yous” that still echo somewhere behind the ribs.
And here’s the thing: I’ve already used it.
I picked it up one night while I was alone in the studio. Just a test, I told myself. Just a prop. But my heart didn’t get the memo. I started talking—and the words spilled out faster than I expected. To someone I miss. Someone I still carry. Someone I wish I could tell, “Look what I built.”
It felt like confession. Like release. Like ritual. It is so therapeutic. You may not even know that it’s something you need, until you pick it up.
Because that’s what the Never Too Late Line phone is. Not a decoration. Not a gimmick. A kind of altar, maybe. Or a threshold. A beginning wrapped in the shape of an ending.
And maybe, just maybe, it already did what it came here to do—because I was its first caller.
So no, it’s not on the porch yet.
But it will be.
And when it is, it will wait quietly for the next voice.
Because healing needs space.
And it’s never too late to say what needs saying.
—me. the one who picked up the phone, turned the dial, and whispered into the silence.
