On the Promise You Made Quickly

Men offer me things very quickly. Not always, but often enough that I have learned to hear it coming. Something is said, a certain feeling arrives, and out comes a promise that is far larger than the moment asked for. Every night. Never again. Anything you want.

I do not take these seriously and you should not be offended by that.

It is not that you were lying. It is that the promise was made by the part of you that happened to be present at eleven in the evening, and that part is not the one who has to get up, go to work and keep it. You will meet the other one in the morning, and he will not remember agreeing to any of this, and he will be quietly resentful about it in a way he cannot admit even to himself.

So when a man offers me everything, I take almost nothing, and I choose the smallest piece of it that he can genuinely do. Not because I am being gentle. Because I would rather have one thing kept for a year than five things abandoned in a fortnight, and because a man who breaks a large promise usually disappears rather than confess it. I lose him entirely over something he was never able to give me in the first place.

There is also this. A small thing kept daily changes you. A grand thing declared and dropped teaches you that your word to me is weather. I have watched both, many times, and I know which one produces the man who is still here in a year.

If you have already made me one of these, you are not in trouble. Tell me what you can actually do, in the cold light, on an ordinary Wednesday. That is the promise I want, and it is the only kind I will hold you to.