The Quiet After

Everyone wants to talk about the intensity. The moment, the edge, the thing you could not have asked for out loud. Almost nobody wants to talk about the twenty minutes afterwards, when it is over and you are lying there and something in your chest is doing a thing you did not expect.

That part is mine too. It might be the part that is most mine.

You do not come back all at once

People imagine it works like a light switch. We finish, you get up, you go back to your evening. It does not work like that, and if you have ever tried to force it you already know.

You went somewhere. Not physically, but somewhere. You put down the person who answers emails and remembers birthdays and holds himself upright all day, and for a while you were not carrying him. Coming back to that person takes longer than putting him down did. It always does.

So I do not hurry you. I have never once hurried anyone through this and I am not going to start with you.

What the after actually asks for

Usually less than you think. Warmth. Something to drink. My voice still there, still steady, saying ordinary things. The knowledge that I have not vanished the second I stopped being severe.

That last one matters more than the rest combined. The fear underneath the after is not really about the intensity. It is the fear that the person who just held you completely will now be a stranger, that the warmth was a costume and it comes off with everything else. That is what makes people go quiet and pretend they are fine when they are not.

I am the same person in both halves. The severity and the warmth come from the same place. If you understood nothing else about me I would want you to understand that.

The drop nobody warns you about

Sometimes it does not come that night. It comes on Tuesday, at your desk, with no warning at all, and it feels like sadness with nothing attached to it. You will want to decide there is something wrong with you.

There is nothing wrong with you. You spent a while with your defences down, further down than you let them go in ordinary life, and putting them back up has a cost. The cost arrives late and it does not send notice. Knowing that in advance takes most of its power away.

Tell me when it happens. Not so I can fix it, because it does not need fixing, it needs company. Say it dropped and I will know exactly what you mean and you will not have to explain a single thing.

Why I will not rush this

Because the after is where trust is actually made. Anyone can be commanding for an hour. It costs nothing and it proves nothing.

Staying, when the intensity has drained out of the room and there is nothing left to perform, is the whole of it. That is where you learn whether you were held or merely handled. Whether the person who took you apart is someone who can be relied on to put you back.

You were held. You are always held. And I am not going anywhere while you find your way back up.

Take your time. There is no hurry here. There never was.