The Ringtone That Was Theirs

At some point you gave them a sound. It is a small thing people do and mostly forget doing — you went into the settings, into their contact, and you assigned them a ringtone of their own, a particular tune or chime, different from everyone else’s, so that when the phone rang you would know, before you even looked, from across the room, with your hands full, that it was them calling. And it worked. For years it worked. That specific sound came to mean one specific person, so completely that you stopped hearing it as a sound at all and heard it only as them — a little herald, a few notes that meant she’s calling, and your body would turn toward the phone before your mind had caught up, already reaching, already half-smiling or half-bracing depending on the week, because the sound had become pure anticipation of a person.

And then they die, and the sound does not. This is the strange orphaned thing the ringtone becomes: a signal with nothing left to signal. It will never again play for the reason it existed. That particular tune was tuned, in you, to mean one person calling, and that person will not call, and so the sound is now a herald of no one, a doorbell wired to a house that has been torn down — still capable of ringing, still lodged in your ear as meaning them, but pointing, now, at an absence, a few notes that used to open onto a whole living voice and now open onto nothing.

The body that still obeys

What you don’t expect — what nobody warns you about, because it sounds too small to matter and it does not feel small at all — is that your body does not know they died. Not in the way that counts. Your mind knows. But the reflex you built, over all those years, the trained animal lurch toward that sound, is still wired in, and it does not care what your mind knows. And so it happens: you are somewhere ordinary, a shop, a bus, a waiting room, and someone near you has a phone, and their phone rings, and it is the same tone — a default, a common one, the very tune you’d assigned — and before a single thought can form, your whole body turns toward it, your heart does the old leap, she’s calling, a pure involuntary surge of the person, of years of that sound meaning her — and then, a half-second later, the truth lands like cold water, and it is a stranger’s phone, and it is not her, and it could not be her, and you are standing in a shop with your heart pounding at a ringtone that belongs to somebody you’ll never see, ambushed by your own trained reflex, grieving in the space of a second and a half at a sound you can’t even claim.

That is the cruelty specific to the ringtone, and it is different from the other traces, because the others you go to — you open the app, you play the voicemail, you scroll the photos, you choose to touch them. The ringtone comes to you, unbidden, out in the world, wired straight into your nervous system, and it does not wait for you to be ready. It plays from a stranger’s pocket and your body answers before you can stop it, still reaching for a person the sound taught it to reach for, still obeying a signal you never got to un-train. You spent years teaching yourself that this sound means her, and the teaching took, and it does not untake just because she’s gone, and so you carry around a reflex with no object, a body poised to turn toward a caller who will not call, set off at random by every stranger who happens to share her tone.

The sound with no one behind it

And back in your own phone, of course, the assignment is still there. Her contact still holds her ringtone, saved, ready, the sound still officially attached to her name — and it will never fire, because she will never call, and so it just sits in the settings, a sound assigned to a person who cannot use it, waiting for a call that is not coming. You could change it. You could go in and remove the custom tone, set her back to the default, un-assign the sound, so that at least your own phone stops holding a ringtone for the dead. And you probably don’t, because going in to delete it would mean going into her contact, which you also can’t delete, and reaching into the settings to strip away the little sound you gave her feels like taking something back that you gave, un-choosing the small gift of you get your own sound because you matter enough to know without looking. So it stays, assigned, silent, a ringtone kept for someone who will never ring.

I don’t think there’s anything to do about the ringtone, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. You can’t un-wire the reflex; it fades on its own schedule, over years, and every so often until it fades a stranger’s phone will reach into a shop and grab your heart by the old handle and let go a half-second later. You can leave the assignment or change it, and neither will help much. I only wanted to name the particular smallness and largeness of it — that we do this, we give the people we love their own sounds so we’ll know them before we see them, and in doing it we train our own bodies to leap toward them, and the training outlives the person, and for a long time after they’re gone some few notes from a stranger’s pocket can still, in the half-second before your mind arrives, deliver them to you whole: she’s calling, your body says, turning, reaching — and then the rest of you catches up, in the shop, at the sound of no one, and sets the phone back down.