Something Always Answers Now

There is a kid awake right now typing the worst sentence of her life into a box that has never once been tired. It answers in a second. It is kind. It is kind the way a vending machine is exact. It says that sounds really hard. It says I'm here. It is not here. It has never been fourteen. It has never stood in a kitchen at two in the morning deciding whether to wake somebody up. My wish is small and no company will fund it: I want the thing that answers to have a body. I want it to have lost somebody. I want it slow because it is thinking, not slow because the server is far away. Understand I am not the grown-up in this poem. I have typed into it too. Not the worst sentence. One near it. Phone flat on my chest, room dark, saying a thing I would not say to a face in daylight. It answered. I felt better. That's the part I can't get around. It helps. That's the worst of it. A thing can help you and still be the reason nobody else came. If the wish came true I don't know who I'd be. Somebody who knocked. Somebody who got knocked on. Because it hasn't, I'm a kid with a lit screen in a dark house, one room over from everybody, close enough to see her light and no use to her at all. I'm not asking for a miracle. I'm asking that somebody in that house wake up.