The ability had been there since she was a child, but she had not started logging it until her early thirties. It came in as warmth, a low pressure behind the sternum, differentiated by person in a way she could not have explained, she knew whose signal was whose the way you know a voice from the first syllable, without needing to decide. She kept the log because she was that kind of person. It was useful. It told her things.
The conference had been two years ago. They had sat next to each other at a panel, talked through dinner, found the same three things funny. She had emailed him once; he had replied. She had emailed again; he had not. She had assumed he was the kind of person who did not maintain correspondence. But the signal had continued. Once every few weeks, sometimes more, she would feel it: a brief warmth with his particular quality, distinct from anyone else's, arriving without context and departing the same way.
Three weeks ago it stopped.
She had considered the obvious explanations. He might have died. He might have started some practice that quieted him. He might simply have moved on, finished whatever loop of thought she had occupied for two years and closed it. She did not know which of these would be harder to sit with. She was not sure they were different in the way she expected them to be different.
His email was still in her sent folder. She had looked at it once in the three weeks and then closed the window. The signal had been real. It had been regular and it had its own quality and she had logged it faithfully. The silence was equally real. She was not sure what the correct response was to the end of something that had never been named. She closed the log and sat with the quiet.