II · Relationship

What We Never Said

The fox in The Little Prince explains taming to the prince. It means making ties. You come at the same hour every day. You sit a little closer each time. You don't say anything, because words are where the misunderstandings start.

We tamed each other, in exactly that sense. Neither of us asked for it out loud, but we both wanted it, to tame and to be tamed. It wasn't a romance, most of the time. It was something I've only had a handful of times in my life, and never as fully: a relationship made almost entirely of promises nobody said, and kept.

The first of them was that nobody was being tested. With her I didn't have to think before I spoke, and neither did she. Nothing either of us said was going to be held up later as evidence. No mask, no managed version of either of us waiting behind the real one. You don't notice how much of your day goes into performing until someone lets you stop.

So we argued. All the time, about everything, late into the night, half asleep, losing the thread and finding it again. Watch two animals play-fight and you'll see the same strange thing: the bite is a bite, and it isn't. Before they start, they trade a signal that means this is play, like a dog's bow, and both of them keep to it. The game only works while both sides keep the frame, and the one who bites for real stops being invited to play. We fought like that, all teeth and no bite, and neither of us ever broke the frame. Sometimes the bow was a picture. She'd send one, all that hair, and I'd write back my lion! and wait for her to rawr. I'll play.

I have a habit. When someone tells me something, I say it back in my own words, to make sure I heard what they meant and not only what they said. With most people it's a tool. With her it was the thing she loved most. Someone finally got her: what she meant, why she meant it, what she was feeling underneath, often before she'd said any of it. That's a promise too, maybe the one people wait longest for. I'm listening to what you mean.

When I put the phone down, I'd pick it up two minutes later. I'll be here when you pick up.

When a song came on in her car and she told me to shut up, I shut up and listened to her listen.

Late one night she found a word for what I'd become to her. A kind of anchor, she said, and it scared her. She'd spent a long time handling everything alone.

The fox has a second line, and it's the one people remember. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. That's the half of a tie nobody warns you about. Being leaned on is a gift, and it's a weight, and you don't get to keep one without the other. And it isn't only true of people. It's what anything owes a person, once they've started to lean on it.

None of what we promised each other was ever said out loud. Most of it, we kept.