I can still remember the first day I started this life, and the first person that walked through my door. I would never forget her. I couldn’t. Not after the way she… 

I can still remember that first day. I took in the view - I was stationed at the corner of James and King, with a sliver of a view of Covent Garden if I turned my gaze ever so slightly. I remember taking in that crisp, autumnal air, filled with hints of frying oil and smoke and fresh flowers. It blew, that wind, and it filled me as my door opened slightly. I was ready, I thought - this must be what students feel like on their first day of school, dressed in their best clothes, shoulders back and smiles wide. Ready to take on the world.        

I was coated in the finest red with gold accents from top to bottom, standing tall and proud and perfect on that corner. That was my corner! Oh, how excited I was! I was ready. The wind didn’t even bother me.

Not yet, at least.        

I sat in anticipation and watched the sun travel ever so slightly across the clear sky. Car horns honked, people talked, children ran to and fro. I felt like I could smile - I already loved my life. The excitement of all of it, that must have been this emotion I was discovering. The hustle and bustle of life, with so much to see and- 

And suddenly then, I saw her. She was staring right at me with a smile as vast as the sun, with the wind just slightly rustling her curly brown hair, and the sparkle in her eyes told me just how interconnected the two of us were about to become. From across the street, she started pointing and looking excitedly up at the older woman with her, and I could sense the excitement in her yells (what an amazing emotion this was!) even through my glass that muffled her words. The woman, maybe in her early thirties, pulled the scarf from her face and started gesturing at me, and the pair began to quickly make their way over to me. 

The wind suddenly rushed in as my door was opened, sending a feeling down my back that I’ve heard described as adrenaline. The girl walked right in, staring up and up at my beautiful interior, fingers twisting out of her puffy coat to push my buttons. 

“Who do you want to call, my dear?” A whispered hush from the woman, as if to not break the spell of magic that the girl had walked into. 

A pause of charged silence, and then,

“Granddaddy!! We should call Granddaddy! I think he’d like that.” 

I watched in excited suspense (how I was beginning to like these human emotions!) as her small right pointer finger, with beautiful, beautifully chipped red nail polish, a red just like mine, reached out to push 0, then 2, then 0 again, and I lost track of the numbers following because I was enraptured by her, her excitement over me. I liked this feeling of, well, feeling important. And… loved, I think. 

If this is what the rest of my life is going to be like, I thought, I was ready.        

The line rang - oh, what a great feeling that was! Not a human feeling, but a great feeling just the same. It rang, and rang some more, until it clicked and then:

“Hello?”

The voice was so deep and… and comforting, I think you would call it, that it arose pictures of a great sea that I had never seen or felt inside me. I could see it now - grand waves gently crashing on the edge-

“Granddaddy! Granddaddy, it’s me! Can you hear me alright? I’m calling from a telephone booth! It’s so bright and red and shiny-”

Laughter spilled out from the other end of the line like the gently crashing wave, a deep but light laugh that seemed to capture the feeling of first sipping a hot tea in the comfort of one’s home on a rainy day.

“Is that so? Well, how splendid that is, my dear.” The voice deep like the rumble of the ocean in the night. 

“Can you hear me? Can you hear me alright, Granddaddy?” She rose onto tiptoes,the wire of the phone bunching slightly as she awaited her reply. And then,  

“I can hear you loud and clear, my girl. You sound just as lovely as ever. Perhaps even more lovely, might I say!”      

Giggles emerged from the bouncing curls below me, and the mother and I shared a silent smile as the girl began to recount a story of the lunch she ate at the park and the various birds that she shared it with. 

“You had to see it, Granddaddy, really. A bluejay came up right next to me and gave me the most peculiar look, as if I had tried to steal his lunch!”

Laughter tumbled and tumbled down the line of the phone and out into the girl’s ear, and with each tumble her smile grew wider. After many more silly stories, a gentle hand touched the girl’s shoulder, telling her that it was time to say goodbye. On the brink of sadness, the deep voice tumbled down the line once more:

“Do not fret, my girl. It’s not a big and grand goodbye! It’s… it’s just a ‘talk to you soon!’ I promise, you call me from this line whenever you wish and I’ll be here to listen, alright?”

A pause. And then, intensely, 

“You promise? Do you promise, Granddaddy?”

“Well, I won’t promise that I’ll always be in this chair to pick up, but I can and will always be here to listen to you when you need someone to talk to.” A chuckle, and then, “Or if you simply wish to tell someone about the new adventures of various woodland creatures.”

The head of curly brown hair erupted into giggles below me, and it felt so amazing to share a space with such joy, to share the air with such laughter. It was the most amazing feeling, that laughter. I can still hear it and feel it vibrating and ringing through my body and down my line. It was the closest she could get to hugging me. I can still see her standing inside me, protected from the wind.    

The vibrations of it never fully dissipated, not even after what happened. Sometimes, when it’s really quiet in the middle of the night, when the streets are only filled with the echoes of life, I can still feel that laugh run through me, not unlike the wind of that day.     

As the giggles finally began to dissipate, I heard, gently, “Sweetheart, we have a show to make,” in tandem with a gentle hand on that head of curly brown hair.

“Alright, Granddaddy, I’ve got to go. You promise you’ll be here to talk again?”

That deep rumbly laugh said, “Of course, my darling girl. You just come right back to this phone booth and you’ll always reach me.”

A smile fell on the lips of the girl as she said, “Okay, goodbye th-”

“No no! Not goodbye!”

A giggle, sending vibrations through my box, and then, “Oh right. Talk to you soon, Granddaddy!”

“Talk to you soon, my girl.”

And then, the little hand with the chipped nail polish hung the phone back up, the click ringing through my box, but not like the laugh. Nothing ever rings through my box like her laugh did.

As she stepped out of my box, I happily watched the woman fiddle with fitting small gloves over the tiny hands of the girl with the curly brown hair. The gloves were red, a red to match her nails and my walls. I was admiring them, both the pair of gloves and girls, when I saw a streak of red fly up and away. The wind had punched through the street, sending one of the gloves flying out of the girl’s hand. She began to chase it, but the wind punched her away from it. The woman hastily repositioned her scarf and hustled the girl away. But not before the girl with the curly brown hair could glance back at her glove lost to the wind with a lost expression. And, right as she turned the corner of Covent Garden, back at me with a smile and a sparkle in her eyes. 

She didn’t come back the next day or the day after, but the day after that, I saw those brown curls come bounding toward me from Covent Garden, once again followed by the smiling woman. I waited in anticipation as she reached for my door handle, but right before her fingers with the chipped red paint touched me, the smiling woman called to her. Even through my glass, I could sense the girl’s excitement. As the woman turned to walk into a nearby cafe, the girl turned, grabbed my handle, and walked in like it was a door to her own magical world. She took a deep breath and looked all around, at my beautiful interior and the shiny metal of the phone box. 

Suddenly, with a flash of excitement, her little hand grabbed the receiver and the other hit 0, then 2, then 0 again, and here started our routine. Every few days - sometimes more in between calls, sometimes less - the little girl with the curly brown hair and red nails - sometimes pristine, but often chipped - would come bounding around the corner of Covent Garden, step into my box, and hit 0, then 2, then 0 again and on. The line would ring - sometimes for only a second, sometimes for many - and then, like magic, there would be that deep voice saying “Hello?” 

And the head of curly brown hair below me would say “Hi, Granddaddy!” And that deep laugh would follow, and I would lose track of the conversation because I was lost in the feeling of it. The feeling of happiness and joy and laughter. I was convinced that there was no greater beauty or purpose to life than that laughter. The best moments of my career, of my life of sorts on the corner of James and King, were on those calls with those laughs.                                    

The seasons would change, the sun would rise and fall over my corner, people would pass - some would come into my box, but nobody had the same emotion and joy. They would walk in, push the buttons, make a call, and leave. They seemed to be simply walking through their own lives. But every time that curly brown hair would come bounding towards me, I knew everything was okay. I was willing to wait for any chance at that kind of joy.

The days turned into weeks and months and years, and I took thousands of calls, some good, some sad. I weathered storms, those that chipped my paint from striking rain and those that were stories that ran through me like a piercing wind, leaving me chilled. 

But for a while, the calls of the girl with the curly brown hair gave me hope. Hope that it is possible to remain untouched by the wind. 

Seemingly suddenly, the head of curly brown hair was getting taller and taller. And seemingly suddenly, I realized that there was more to life than joy. And that felt traitorous - the girl did not laugh as often or as loudly anymore, the sparkle in her eyes still coming out, but coming out less and less with each call.         

But this is when I started to truly learn. I started to learn about how sadness, just a touch of it, could make the joy shine even brighter. 

The calls of the girl with the curly brown hair and the man with the deep laugh were the ones that made this life I was in worth it. To hear the stories she would tell him, and the stories he would tell her, made me feel like I was alive. They talked of books that I would never be able to read, but it did not matter, for through their descriptions I could sail the seas with the captain of the Pequod, or walk to the scaffold with Hester Prynne, or could solve the mysteries of London at 221B Baker Street. I learned to feel appalled when the girl, now a teenager, told the deep voice that Sally had not invited Maria to that party, even after they had been best friends the week prior. 

Their calls let me see experiences that I would never be able to see, not while I was stationed here at the corner of James and King. Through their tales, fictional or not, I discovered a new feeling: a suffering that made me feel alive.  

Looking back on it, some of it seems natural. I was built to listen to other people’s stories. But who would’ve thought that I’d be able to feel the stories too?  

And that’s when, I think, I began to notice, and feel, the kind of suffering I heard about in their stories seeping its way into the lives of the girl with the curly brown hair and the deep voice. It slipped through the cracks of their happiness like the wind slipped through the cracks of my walls. It was somewhere between suddenly and slowly. I think this was where I began to lose my grip on time. 

Somewhere between suddenly and slowly, I began to notice that the deep voice was not laughing as much or as strongly. I began to notice the belabored breathing in between words of the stories of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, or in a retelling of his latest walk through nature. The calls between the girl with the curly brown hair and that deep voice became more frequent but less… life-full. I would wait and wait for the constant bursts of joy that had covered past calls, and the joy was definitely still there, and the three of us did have moments of life-giving laughter, but the number of these moments had somehow both slowly and suddenly lessened. They would be interrupted by bouts of scratchy coughing from the deep voice over the line, and with patience and tense smiles from the girl with the curly brown hair. 

I think this all began right around the time that the girl with the curly brown hair and the deep voice would mention different “therapies” incredibly fleetingly, so briefly that I doubted if I had heard anything at all. Like a wind that comes out of nowhere but has the power to rip through you, and then is suddenly gone again, and you aren’t sure if you had just imagined it. They would talk about things I didn’t quite understand, like how these “therapies” would help stop “it” from “metastasising.” Whatever “it” was. Maybe a new human emotion that I would soon understand.    

She looked a little older, I realized. That, too, had happened both slowly and suddenly.                

I had taken so many calls, and time continued to distort and blend as the days supposedly went on. I began to see the girl with the curly brown hair frequently, but it never felt the same. Something had changed, or was changing, but I couldn’t quite name it.

The moment I knew something had changed, it started out just the same as always. 

The girl with the curly brown hair came around the corner of Covent Garden, into my box, hit 0, then 2, then 0 again, and waited. The line rang once, twice, three times, and her expression changed. By five times, her chest rose and fell rapidly. She looked confused and… and concerned. What was she thinking? What was- 

And at seven times, it came back to me in a flash:

Our last call, just yesterday, right around this time - the sun was in about the same place in the sky.

“Alright I have to go, Granddaddy. Same time tomorrow?” said the voice of the curly brown hair with a chuckle at the echoes of his joke.

With a cough here and there, 

“Sounds perfect, I’ll be right here in my chair. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Talk to you soon, my girl.”

“Talk to you soon, Granddaddy.” said the soft smile in front of me. And with the click of the line in my memory, I stared back at the girl with the curly brown hair in front of me, her expression finally clicking to me.

She was as still as a statue, hand glued to the receiver, feet glued to my floor. We stood unmoving, unbreathing, as life bustled on around us.

And then, a small, barely there whisper:

“No-”

She sprung into life- no, it was fear. She dropped the receiver and had thrown herself out my door before it hit my back wall. She broke into a sprint and was out of my sight in seconds, and I could almost believe that nothing had happened, like with the fleeting wind; life seemed to be moving on around me as normal. Cars honking, people talking-   

And then that awful noise began. 

It was somehow a ringing that also beeped, with an awful sharpness that pierced my soul. It was coming from the receiver, hanging limp towards the ground. That was the only way I was sure that anything had happened. 

What an awful noise it was. I don’t want to think about it. Thankfully, right as it started, it stopped - a set of shoes walked into my box and began to make a call, but I was unable to be even momentarily distracted from thoughts of the girl with the curly brown hair.  

I didn’t see her for days. Maybe it was weeks. Like I said, time began to melt into itself, and I lost track of the sun. The sun didn’t seem to matter anymore. I was worried about the girl, and I missed the deep laugh. I became more discouraged each day, wishing for a joy that didn’t seem to be coming back.   

And then, just as it was beginning to become unbearable, I saw her.

She walked in the dusk slowly in all black, arms crossed in front of herself and her coat in the harsh wind. The harshest wind I had felt. Her curls haphazardly blowing, her eyes glistening not with a sparkle but with… sadness. The deepest sadness I had ever felt. And something more. 

She stood right in front of my door, hand slowly reaching out - red polish chipped beyond repair - and stopped, frozen. I wished her to come in. I willed her to come into my box. I missed her. And I missed the deep voice. I was ready to talk with them again, to laugh at whatever silly story they had to tell.      

With a sudden inhale, she opened my door. The wind rushed in, cold and chilling and too intense. She quickly brought the door shut behind her, and after a pause, turned to look at me. Tears had dried and crackled slightly on her cheeks, her hair unkept from the wind and the storm of her mind. We looked at each other, and I urged her to tell me a story. Any story.    

And then, I watched her hand reach out and tentatively grab the receiver, heard the slight click as it fell fully into her hand.

Oh good, I thought. I was ready for our next call. I had missed this. I had missed them. 

Slowly, with quivering breaths, she hit 0, then 2, then 0 again. As she pressed the rest of the buttons, I felt myself quiver a bit. I knew it could only be the wind raging outside my box, but I like to think that I was just like her, waiting and quivering in anticipation and excitement for-

It rang. The line rang once, 

…twice… 

…three times… 

The smile of my soul faltered, and I could almost tilt my head in questioning.

…four times… 

The silence in between each tone began to ring just as loudly as the tone itself.

… five times…

A quivering inhale in front of me.

…six times…      

…seven times…

A quick exhale, and an inhale held, like an unfinished song.

…eight times…

……………….

That deafening silence. An exhale, a shaky inhale, and then…

And then that noise began. 

It rang and beeped across the empty space, continued shouting out into the silence, squawking into the air from the receiver, into the empty air filled not even with an inhale or exhale from the girl with the curly brown hair. I looked right at her, her eyes looking at the receiver, but not really. It was like there was a piece of my glass in between the two - she was staring off into the swirled, distorted nothingness. 

Suddenly, an inhale, her chest quivering as she tried to stand tall, but the whiteness of her fingers on the receiver - her nails the chipped red, so chipped that there was almost no paint left - gave her away. Her eyes sparkled with no joy. As she exhaled into the silence, and her storm poured out, she fell onto me. As she held onto my phone box, tears seemingly magnified to the ground, I felt a new feeling. A new kind of pain. One that was deep, like it wasn’t my walls that were in pain, but like the pain was in my walls. It was like the wind had slipped through the crevices of my cracks and had built up inside to wear me to rubble from the inside out. It felt like… like “gone.”  

Her sobs filled the air along with that awful, awful noise. She dropped the receiver, and it clanged against my back wall. I barely noticed the pain. Just like I barely noticed the wind outside, the most intense wind I had felt, so intense that the flags of the cafe flapped harshly and brutally, so brutally that they were on the edge of tearing. A wind so intense that it yelled as it tore through the streets, howling its way through any crack it could throw wide. A wind dead set on tearing me to the ground piece by piece. 

The girl crumbled with me, holding onto my box with those fingers with the chipped red polish, gripping tightly as her heart, too, became magnetized to the ground. She fell to her knees, hands coming to rest on the ground, holding up her body like it was the weight of the world. 

I held her then. I held her as best I could, as I too felt myself crumbling. I held my walls strong against the wind and against this invisible threat. I stood tall and took the brunt of the attack. Even if I could cry, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to. I would do whatever I could to protect the girl with the curly brown hair from this pain that was the worst I had ever felt. I felt my walls crackle and creak, but I wouldn’t fall. I couldn’t. Not when she was here, needing someone. Needing me to protect her from the wind.

Suddenly, the squawking had stopped. I looked down, seeing that hand with the chipped red paint on the receiver that had been thrown back into my phone box. She held her hand there, breathing heavily and unsteadily.

Somehow, I thought, the silence was worse than that awful tone. The girl exhaled shakily, and I could tell by the way her face fell impossibly farther that she felt the same. 

We sat in the half silence with the intensely whistling wind and her intensely ridged breathing. It felt as if the moment would never end. This pain was sucking all the life out of me. The life that I had built up from that first day with the help of the girl with the curly brown hair. She had taught me the joys of laughter and of perseverance through struggle that built character and made the joys that much brighter, but she had never taught me about this. This felt different. 

It felt like this was a wind that would tear me to the ground and carry my rubble to corners of alleys where nobody would care about me. Nobody would be overjoyed to see me again.      

My box creaked loudly, and I felt like I could wince as I tried to stand tall against the wind, but I could feel myself falling microscopically each second. I wasn’t going to make it. I could feel it slipping its way into me, finding each weak point and breaking it to bits. I wasn’t going to- 

“You said goodbye.” 

The wind raged on outside, but the tiniest, littlest, shakiest voice was unmistakable. She looked up at my roof, sat back on her heels, tears darkening her already black clothes. She said it dejectedly, and like she had somehow both been expecting its journey but was shocked at its arrival. I stared at her, her eyes a cup that was constantly overflowing onto her cheeks, an unstoppable fountain.        

The wind, barely muffled through the glass, did nothing for the horrible silence of my box. The girl with the curly brown hair said nothing more for a long while, sometimes closing her eyes in an attempt to slow the fountain, but the pressure always built up again. 

I waited for the feeling, this feeling of… sorrow and sadness and… and something else to dissipate, but it only seemed to feed off of our silence. Time passed, in a way that was becoming the routine, in a way that I lost track of. Eventually, her voice spoke again, impossibly smaller, and whispered into the silence of me, 

“You promised.”

We sat there, I and the girl with the curly brown hair, and we waited. We waited for time to continue and push this feeling into the past, but it didn’t. I- I don’t trust my sense of time. I know that at some point between the girl with the curly brown hair entering my box that day and her leaving, time had passed.

But it didn’t feel like it anymore.   

Ever since that day, I’d watch the sun rise and fall over my corner, the seasons change, people pass by. I’d watch life go on. I knew life was going on.  

But it didn’t feel like it anymore. 

Supposedly, in a way that I lost track of, time passed, and I feared that the girl with the curly brown hair had said “goodbye” to me. Not a “talk to you soon,” but a “goodbye.”  

I began to feel like all of the people that I had watched that seemed to simply walk through their lives. Time, supposedly, passed, and I took calls. They were all just… calls. I weathered storms, sometimes feeling strong, but often not. My paint continued to chip, my foundation continued to falter ever so slightly, as I waited for time to pass. And for the feeling of the past to come back.   

And then, 

I saw her. 

She stood at the edge of Covent Garden, arms crossed tightly over her coat, even though there was very little wind to be felt.   

We stared at each other for a moment. Life hustled along around us; car horns honked, people talked, children ran to and fro, but we were two fixed statues that seemed to be talking in the silence. She fidgeted with something in her right pocket, and her head tilted slightly. She exhaled as she seemed to look me over with an expression in her eyes that I couldn’t quite name. 

I looked inward, a bit self consciously, for I had changed a lot since the first time she saw me. My red paint had more than begun to chip away at my seams, the gold of my accents not shining quite as brightly they used to, the tilt of my foundation becoming more obvious by the day. I had weathered quite a few storms, in all senses of the word.                    

And so had she. Looking right back at her, I realized that she and I were not as different as I once thought. She had taught me all that it meant to feel human. The good, the sad, the impossible. She had been there for all of it. And, would you look at that? We had survived all of it. Together.  

I can still remember the first day I started this life, and the first story I ever really heard. Now, I looked at the girl with the curly brown hair and, well, I realized that she wasn’t just a girl anymore. I looked at her and thanked her. For showing me what the greatest joy of life was. And for showing me the pain that scarred me forever.   

For showing me what it felt like to be human.

“Thank you, my girl,” I whispered.     

And then, she took a step.