What do you say when you call someone who died on a Wind Phone?

There is no required script. Common starting points are saying their name out loud, telling them about your day the way you used to, asking a question you never got an answer to, or simply staying on the line without speaking. Any of these is a complete call.

What if I don't know what to say at all?

Start with their name. Many people find that saying the name out loud is enough to loosen the rest of the sentence, and if nothing else comes, staying quiet on the line is still a real use of the call.

Is it weird to talk out loud to a phone that isn't connected to anything?

It feels that way to almost everyone the first time. The strangeness usually fades within the first minute, because your body already knows how to hold a phone and talk into it, and that familiar posture makes the words come more easily than silence would.

What to actually say

There is no script. There are ways in.

There is no script for this, and if there were, it would not help much, because reading lines off a screen turns the call into a performance, and the whole point is that no one is watching. But the blank space of not knowing what to say is exactly what stops people before they ever pick up the receiver, so here are some ways in. Not a script. Doors.

You will not need all of them on any given call. Most people use one, and a different one the next time, and some calls end up being none of these at all.

Ways in

Say their name. Out loud, once, is sometimes the whole call. It costs nothing and it is where nearly everyone starts, even people who go on to say a great deal more.
Tell them about today. The ordinary update you would have given without thinking: the weather, what you ate, who you ran into, the thing that went wrong with the car. This was most of what you talked about when they were alive. It still counts.
Ask the question. The one you never got an answer to and never will. Asking it does not require getting anything back. Some questions were only ever meant to be spoken, not answered.
Say the apology. Whatever it is, overdue or small or enormous, it does not require them to grant forgiveness for saying it to leave your body and stop circling.
Say nothing and stay on the line. Hold the receiver. Breathe. A silent call is not a failed one. Some of the heaviest things do not have words attached to them yet, or ever.

None of these are more correct than the others. A call that is just their name is not smaller than a call that runs long. Length was never the measure of anything here.

The fear of feeling stupid

Almost everyone feels foolish the first time, talking out loud to a line connected to nothing, to a person who cannot hear it. That feeling is real and it is also short. The first call is often the most awkward one, and it tends to pass faster than expected, because your body has held a phone like this before, usually with this exact person on the other end, and the old posture takes over before the self-consciousness can finish making its case.

If it still feels strange after a minute, that is fine too. Nobody grades the call. Some people talk for a long time and some people say four words and hang up, and both are the whole point of a phone that is not listening for anything in particular.

What tends to trip people up is waiting to feel ready before they pick up the receiver. There is no version of ready that arrives on its own. Most people who make the call do it a little before they feel prepared, say the first thing that surfaces, and find out afterward that it was enough.

Pick up the Wind Phone

Say what you need to say. The line is connected to nothing: no one hears you, nothing is recorded, nothing is stored.