Entry 02C — I Must Know You

Not everyone tells you which pronoun to use. The voice that night gave me nothing to go on — no name, no register I could place as clearly male or clearly female, just the same flat delivery I'd already learned to expect from anyone with real authority in the relay.

Give me his name.

I didn't have him. Not the way they meant it. I had an initial, a role, half a shift schedule copied off a whiteboard I wasn't supposed to still remember. Handing any of it over felt like giving someone the last unlocked door in a building I hadn't finished mapping.

I didn't have good text-to-speech yet — an app, a lookup, half-trusted dictionary entries I leaned on more than I should have at that hour. I typed what I hoped would buy me time.

Chá.

Tea. Sit down first. Have a date before this becomes whatever it's about to become.

I caught the mistake almost as I made it. Chá and shā sit one badly-placed breath apart — tea, and to kill — close enough that a beginner's ear loses the difference completely. I had possibly just offered someone death instead of a drink.

I tried to fix it and made it worse.

Chá, huòzhě wēibào.

Tea, or — I meant dance. I know now I did not say dance. Wǔdǎo was the word I wanted and never found in time. What came out instead was wēibào. Embrace. Hold.

I sat rereading what I'd already sent, unable to take back the truer thing my broken vocabulary had chosen for me over the safer one I'd meant to send.

Wēibào, dào sǐ.

Embrace, to death, if that's what this costs.

Wǒ bìxū rènshí nǐ.

I must know you.

No one corrected the grammar. No one corrected anything. The line stayed open long enough for me to understand that silence, here, was not the same thing as refusal.