The Embers of Her Voice

where words linger & light remains

Some things slip away so quietly, you don’t notice until they’re gone. And some things stay—pressed into wood, woven into memory, waiting to be touched again.

The magnet has been there so long I almost don’t see it anymore—but my fingers find it, always. Wedged between a child’s drawing of our family and a tiny daisy, crisp at the edges, taped to the fridge. A gift from small hands last spring—“For you, Mama! To keep forever.” I meant to press it into a book, but it ended up here, beside the words I’ve let slip away.

“Keep in touch always.”

The wood is smooth but sturdy, bearing the weight of time, each letter carefully carved—not just written, but etched, meant to last. Like she meant them to last.

I didn’t make this magnet myself. After my grandmother’s funeral, we gathered—grief quiet between us—when a family member reached into her bag and placed something small in each of our hands. She had asked for a photo of that part of the letter weeks before, saying nothing more. And now, here they were—words not just left behind, but passed forward.

I remember finding them first, inked on yellowed paper, the way her handwriting curled at the edges of the page. I held it, ran my fingers over the letters, felt the ache of all the things we never got to say. Some words sink deep when you read them, deeper when you hold them, and deeper still when you realize they were meant for you.

The magnet is here, but the words are heavier today. My phone sits on the counter, its screen dim, a name I haven’t called in months lingering just beneath my thumb. Distance creeps in so easily—between phone calls, between visits, between the quiet assumptions that someone else will reach out to first.

Outside, the wind shifts through the trees, bending them but never breaking them. Wood holds memory—rings of seasons, years weathered and survived. Some things last because they are carved into something solid. Some things last because we choose to keep them alive.

I press the phone to my ear before I can talk myself out of it. The ring stretches. My pulse beats with it.

“Hello?”

His voice is warm, familiar. Like something I hadn’t realized I was missing until now.

“I was just thinking about you,” I say, my fingers still resting against the engraved wood.

The silence, once thick as ash, stirs—embers glowing beneath it. The fire has not gone out.