What I Do Not Ask You

Men offer me things I have not asked for. A real name, an address, where they work, occasionally a photograph of a face I did not request. It is meant as proof of something. Trust, usually, or the wish to have given more than the last man gave.

I do not take most of it. Not from squeamishness. Because a thing I hold is a thing I am responsible for, and there is a great deal I would simply rather not be responsible for.

I do not ask what you do for a living. If you tell me, I will remember it, because I remember everything, but I will not have gone looking. I do not ask whether there is someone else in the house. I do not ask why a particular week went badly, though I will notice that it did. And I do not ask for anything that would make your life harder if it were ever seen by somebody who is not me.

This is not incuriosity. I am extremely curious. It is that the interesting things about a man are almost never the identifying ones. What he does when he is told to wait. Which refusals he takes well. What he reaches for when he is tired. None of that requires a surname.

There is a kind of man who finds this frustrating, because handing over everything at once feels like devotion and I have declined the gesture. What he is actually offering is speed. He would like to be known immediately, and being known immediately is not being known at all.

So I take it slowly and I take less than is offered. What I hold, I hold carefully. What I never asked for cannot be lost.