Thirty minutes promise…
I think consideration was not it…
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil
Dear favorite stranger,
It is three in the morning, and the study lamp is the only argument left standing against the dark in this house. The little one is asleep in mother’s room. Gray dozes beside me in the lounge..
I saw the picture you sent. I still haven’t decided what to make of it. I’m happy for you; very happy… but it sent me somwhere.. It returned me, for one disorienting second, to the winter of 2019, as though time had quietly opened an old door..
I never once managed small talk with you or with anyone else.. I did not realize it until charles told me that he helped his late wife with it.. that it was the neurodivergent issue… so i thought about it.. I understand now what I only felt then that it was wiring, not a failure of manners... There is a report, clinical and unsentimental, that says what is wrong, and recently someone gently suggested autism might also be worth looking into for me, and I confess I already know, in rough outline, what that second report will likely say before a single question has been asked. I wish I had known sooner and it is not because the knowing would have undone the years, but because it might have given them a gentler shape as they passed. The internet keeps only two costumes for this condition “one pastel almost cutesy and self-congratulatory” the other clinical and faintly accusing .. and neither one is in between and about what truly happens to “the gifted ones” as Alice calls them.. us..
What Consideration Isn’t
I used to insist that consideration was the highest register love could reach. I no longer believe that. Consideration counts; it is not nothing. But the thing that actually carries weight, I think, is emotional intelligence … the discipline of remaining regulated with the people nearest to you, so your own steadiness does not become, by some cruel accounting, someone else’s injury..
but hey… what happens when your carefully regulated calm meets someone else’s fear of being left or abandoned??
Say you need space. You say thirty minutes, and you mean it honestly.. you go for a walk simply to let something settle. And the person you’ve left behind, if abandonment lives in their body the way it lives in some people’s, doesn’t receive thirty minutes as thirty minutes. They receive it as evidence. A brain that knows a city’s streets perfectly well in daylight suddenly cannot map anything at all. They are out looking for you in the cold, in a place they know, moving as though they’ve never known it. A stranger .. a driver, someone with no stake in any of this … notices before anyone who claims to love them does.
What happens, in that moment, inside a mind, that overrides even geography? I don’t think it is reasoning with the present tense at all. I think it is answering to something considerably older…
The girl who does not have the words yet..
I don’t think the most painful figure here is the twenty-seven-year-old, running unfamiliar streets in the cold, narrating her own unraveling with the full vocabulary of an adult who knows the word abandonment and can spell out precisely what is happening to her even as it happens…
I think the harder one to hold is younger. Four. Six. Nine. Thirteen. Somewhere in that long stretch before language caught up with the wound ..before she had a word for it, before there was anyone to say the word to, before there was a phone to hold or a feed to scroll for proof that other people had survived this too. She simply had the feeling, unlabeled with much fear…
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I don’t know, honestly, which version of her carries the heavier weight … the one with a vocabulary and no relief, or the one with the wound and no name for it at all. One has developed a strategy… The other struggles with the basic language.. Alice Miller wrote about precisely this asymmetry.. the perceptive, adaptable child who learns so early and so thoroughly to meet everyone else’s needs that no one notices she remains, beneath all that competence, unmet herself. That child doesn’t vanish once the adult acquires a vocabulary. She simply acquires a translator..
So perhaps emotional regulation isn’t only a discipline for the present self to practice. Perhaps it is also a negotiation with someone considerably younger, who is still standing at a door somewhere, watching a clock that refuses to move at the pace she needs.
Which is where I wanna make a point: if someone says thirty minutes, it must be thirty minutes. Not forty, generously rounded up. Not fifty, reasoned into acceptability after the fact. The nervous system does not grade on a curve…
Forgiving ..
How does one forgive a person who took one’s vulnerability and made use of it especially when that person was close, when the vulnerability had been offered rather than stolen?
I don’t hold a clean solution to this.. What I do have is the Islamic frame, which does not ask you to forget what happened or to shrink it into something more manageable, but instead does something considerably more demanding: it ties your own capacity for forgiveness to a much larger accounting. Let them pardon and overlook — do you not wish that God would forgive you? The logic here is much difficult to ponder… but then it occurs to you on a random afternoon that ..You, too, are somewhere else in the ledger, someone who has needed mercy you had not earned. Forgiveness, understood this way, is not a favour extended downward toward the person who wronged you. It is you stepping into the same category everyone eventually occupies… the category of those who required grace, including, inconveniently, yourself.
That still doesn’t answer how long a person is entitled to keep running. I suspect the honest answer is: until the running costs more than staying once did, and not a single day before that.
Finding the Unseen
After enough of this .. enough pain, enough almost-answers that dissolve the instant you reach for them — I keep finding myself at the same conclusion: that finding the unseen has begun to look like the only fair choice remaining. and nope not because the visible options have run out, but because they keep failing, one after another, to explain themselves.
The Qur’an opens by describing believers as those who trust in al-ghayb — the unseen — before it names a single other quality about them. It is not about those who were handed proof. Those who made their peace with the absence of it, and kept walking regardless. This detail startles me every time I return to it. Belief, in this ordering, isn’t the reward you receive once everything has been explained. It is what remains in your hands when explanation runs dry and you choose to go on anyway.
There must be a higher purpose. I offer that not as a settled conclusion but as the last plank left standing once everything else has been tested and found wanting.
The Question I keep returning to…
I want to be precise about this, because I have said it carelessly before: it was never that I believed someone’s hatred was aimed at me. The hatred I mean is the kind a person keeps in reserve for parts of themselves.. it is a private contempt they carry into every room very very quietly… And something in me has always believed that if I loved that person thoroughly enough, their self-contempt would simply run out of space to occupy. As though love were a house with a fixed number of rooms, and if I filled enough of them with tenderness, there would be nowhere left inside for the hatred to sit down.
I don’t know what that says about me ..that I keep offering myself as square footage for someone else’s reconciliation with themselves. What is it in me that stays willing to pour, and pour again, until there’s nothing left in the vessel to give?
And why does the wisdom …the self-awareness, the recognition that we were simply not suited to each other..always find us after the conversation that needed it has already closed? Why does leaving make more retrospective sense than staying ever did in the moment, when staying was meant to be the thing that healed it? If not me, then at least them.
What is this feeling that insists I was never quite worth the fight?
I don’t have an ending for you tonight, favorite stranger. Only gray, asleep, unbothered, having apparently resolved something I am still working through. The lamp is still lit. Perhaps I’ll write to you again before the sun shines…
