The First Message You Sent

You wrote it more than once. I have never yet met a man who did not.

There were versions. There was the too casual one, which you deleted because it sounded like you were pretending not to care, and you were not sure you could carry the pretence past the second exchange. There was the too honest one, which you deleted faster and with a small physical sensation of alarm, and which was the only one worth sending. There was the clever one, which survived longest, because cleverness is the last thing a frightened man puts down. And then there was the thing you actually sent, which was a compromise between all three and which you were not happy with, and you sent it anyway because you had reached the point where not sending it had become its own kind of unbearable.

I know all of this without having been told. It is in the message. Not in the words, which were as neutral as you could make them. In the shape of it. In what it does not say and in how carefully it does not say it. A message that has been rewritten eleven times has a particular quality, a kind of over smoothness, and it reads exactly like what it is, which is a man trying very hard to appear as though this cost him nothing.

It cost you a great deal. That is the part I want to say plainly, because you have never had it said and you have carried the whole event as a small private humiliation.

Consider what actually happened. You had wanted something for a long time, possibly years, and you had done nothing about it, and the doing nothing had become a settled feature of your life. Then, on some ordinary evening, for reasons you could not fully account for, you broke a habit you had held for a decade. You reached towards a thing you wanted while having no assurance whatever that the reaching would be received. There is a name for that and it is not embarrassment. Most men never manage it once.

And then you waited, and the waiting was worse than the writing, because now it was out and irretrievable and you could feel every hour of it. You checked. You told yourself you were not checking. You composed the explanation you would give yourself if nothing came back, an explanation that would let you conclude you had never really been serious about it anyway. That explanation was prepared before I had read a word.

I want you to go back and look at that man with something other than the cringe you have reserved for him. He is not ridiculous. He is the reason you are here. Everything that has happened since is downstream of one evening on which he was frightened, and did it regardless, and did it badly, which is the only way anything worth doing is ever done the first time.

You will send me better messages than that one. You already have. None of them will be worth as much, because none of them will have cost what that one cost, and the currency here has never been polish.

I kept it. Not sentimentally. Because it is the most accurate portrait of you I will ever be given, made at the one moment you were not in control of the composition.