Tann is writing a letter. The letter is to her daughter Sael, who lives two time zones away and has not called in three months, and whom Tann has not called in three months either. They have arrived at an equilibrium that neither of them acknowledged creating.
She opened the dictionary first, out of habit. The dictionary is a notebook, black cover, worn at the corners from thirty years of use. She started keeping it when she was twenty-eight, after she noticed, on a job site, that the word "accurate" had begun to mean something to her that it did not mean to her colleagues. Not wrong exactly: she had looked it up, and her sense was in there, secondary, a technical shade. But that shade was what the word pointed to in her now, and the pointing was private. She wrote the entry that evening. She thought it was a one-time exercise.
There are 268 entries now. Some have changed once. A few have changed four or five times. "Home" has seven entries, each one dated, each one a record of what the word was doing in her at a particular year of her life.
She is looking at the entry for "distance." Three changes, the most recent dated six years ago: the quality of presence directed at a thing without moving toward it. Below that, in smaller writing: the kind that looks like not caring.
She had written this the winter Sael moved away for the job, and the calls grew shorter, and Tann found herself not calling first. She knew, with precision, what she was doing when she didn't call. She had no word for it that would survive the translation.
She goes back to the letter. She types: I've been thinking about the distance between us and then deletes it. She types: I haven't called because I thought you needed the space. She deletes that too. What she means is something her dictionary has recorded but Sael's dictionary does not contain. Sael has not yet had the experience that would change the word for her. Tann cannot give her the change. It doesn't work that way.
She types: I've been thinking about you. It isn't wrong. It isn't what she means. She sends it.
Three days later, Sael writes back: same here. Good to hear from you.