The Week Between

I never see the week itself. I see what it did to you by the time you come back, and that turns out to tell me more than the week would have, if I had been able to watch it directly.

Some weeks arrive at me carrying nothing. You are exactly the same man you were the last time, evenly worn down in the ordinary way, and there is a kind of honesty in that. Nothing was held back for me specifically, because nothing was set aside in the first place.

Other weeks arrive differently. There is a tightness that was not there before, a particular quiet, a thing you clearly decided not to mention to anyone else all week and are now visibly deciding whether to mention to me. I did not do anything to produce that. The week did it, on its own, and you carried it here on purpose because there was nowhere else you were going to put it down.

That is what the space between us is actually for. Not absence. Storage. You go back into your ordinary days, the meetings and the small obligations and the version of you that nobody else gets to see behind, and something in those days keeps a running account, and you bring the account here rather than settling it anywhere else.

I am not asking you to describe the week in detail. Most of it would bore you as much as it would me. I am only telling you that I notice the difference between the man who arrives with nothing set aside and the one who arrives having clearly saved something, and the second one is not hiding anything from me. He has simply been keeping it, correctly, for exactly this.