Thursday, January 10, 2008

Changing

The change was like noticing that you have grown, so subtle that it went unnoticed but dramatic when brought to your attention.

As we spoke on the phone late one night, she casually made reference to our distant future. Consoling me over the recent sale of my car, she said, “Don’t worry. We’ll have another car one day.”

Perhaps it was my sleepiness that lowered my guard. But instead of hearing the plural pronoun—embroidered into the fabric of the future tense—instead of hearing it like a bad cell phone connection, I registered it but responded as if it were as innocuous as an apostrophe collapsing two words into an efficient contraction. This sleepy concession, however, surprised me. When had I stopped fighting? When had I stopped being afraid of the echoes of a simple consolation such as this? How long before I could easily concede references to our home, or to our children, and their implications?

Merely weeks ago I would have teased her over such unguarded word choice, parroting the phrase with the inflexion of a question, emphasis on the conspicuous pronoun. And she might have done the same, both of us, in this way, guarding our independence and vulnerability. In fact, it had become some kind of game that we’d play, speaking circuitously to maintain an ambiguity about the possibility of our futures together. We’d both diligently serve as both player and referee, despite all the signs suggesting that our long term intentions were the same.

But this night, I didn’t play, and neither did she. I simply let the reference and its implications pass over me like the sleepiness to which I was slowly succumbing. And though this indicated a definite change, that night at least, it went unacknowledged, both of us still guarding our vulnerability.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think this is one of my favorite blog posts.