What Comes Back Changed

You call into the canyon and hear yourself returned, but it is not quite you—the vowels stretched, the consonants worn soft by air, a version of what you said, filtered through a thousand small collisions. Every word is an echo of an echo. We speak the names our parents gave us and hear in them the names of their parents, each telling slightly different, each generation pressing its thumbprint into the clay before it hardens. The photograph fades from color into sepia, then into the space between seeing and memory. What we hold is already disappearing, yet we grip tighter, as if holding could stop the transformation that begins the moment we look away. Nothing returns intact. Not the love letter reread years later with different eyes, not the song we heard in our youth, not the version of ourselves we keep locked in amber, already changed by the very act of remembering. And still we listen for the echo, still we call into the dark, knowing what comes back will be some other thing entirely— not what we sent, but evidence that something travels, and returns.