Does the Thought Even Count?
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
I wished I could take the words back as soon as they left my lips. How shallow they sounded from my vantage point of dry earth and warm clothes, security. My newly made friends in Iowa could be watching their houses, businesses, cars colliding in a rush of water, mud, and other people’s memories.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
What I meant was can I send something that is suddenly in low supply, something dry, anything dry. How the postal service would deliver them was anybody’s guess but to not offer, seemed barbarian. I should have explained in a flood of intentions, emotions, concrete suggestions, but hadn’t they had enough of a deluge already? What do we do when suddenly cast in such a role?
You help, you offer, and you mean it. So maybe I wasn’t so crass, so shallow as the words sounded to my ear. Perhaps when recovered in the drenched voicemail box of a soggy cell phone, or dried from a rusted email account, the words will be the branch they were intended to be.
