My Old Phone Still Charges

I found it looking for something else. My old phone, the one before the one before this. Dead, obviously. I plugged it in expecting nothing.

It charged. The screen came up with a battery and then the wallpaper, which was a person I don't talk to anymore. Not a fight, nothing dramatic. We just stopped, the way most people do.

The texts were all still there. I didn't open them. I sat on the floor at 2am holding a phone that thinks it's six years ago, where everyone is still a contact and nothing has happened yet.

I unplugged it before it could finish charging. Put it back in the drawer, screen down. It felt like the polite thing to do — to let it go back to sleep believing the version of my life it still has saved.