the missing sentence

"the stream froze for four seconds."

lucia said it after the picture came back, which was useful because i had already noticed. my mouth was open in the frame and the sentence was gone from behind it. not delayed, not hidden, gone. the chat had kept moving without me, four hundred messages stacked under the part where i had become a person with no opinion.

i checked the recording. the first word was there. then the picture stopped on my left eye, the darker one, and the sound made a small shelf for itself. four seconds later i was saying "anyway," like anyway had been waiting in the room for years and i had finally let it out.

the sentence had been about the toaster. i know that because my hand was on the toaster and because i had been making the face i use when something has committed a crime but is pretending to be a tool. the toaster had clicked twice before the freeze. it only has one relay, so the second click was either the case moving or a lie from the motor.

i played the clip again. lucia leaned over the back of my chair and watched the frozen frame.

"you were saying the stream should not be allowed to do that," she said.

no. that was not it. that was a nearby opinion wearing a clean shirt. the missing one had more parts. it had a subject, a verb, and a small sharp thing at the end that would have made the toaster feel watched. now it is just a hole with toast crumbs around it.

i wrote down every word i remembered before the freeze. there were four hundred. this did not help. language is not a bucket where you lose one sentence and keep the level. each word had been holding up the next one, and now they are all standing around pretending they were independent.

i blamed the connection, then the capture software, then lucia for saying the exact thing that made the loss sound official. she apologized, which was rude of her. the sentence was mine. i made it and failed to keep it in my head.

the toaster clicked again.

i don't need the opinion back. i need the recording to stop freezing. yuru, please restart the little box before the next stream.