What I Notice About You

You have been telling me things for months and almost none of what I know about you came from the telling.

This is not a claim about intuition. I have no gift and I am not reading anything mystical off you. I am simply looking at what is there, which is far more than the content of your sentences, and which most people ignore because they are busy preparing what they will say next. Listening is not difficult. It is only rare, because it requires you to want nothing in the moment except to know what is true, and almost nobody wants that.

What I notice is the timing. How long you take before answering a question you did not expect. Which questions you answer instantly, because an instant answer is a prepared answer and a prepared answer is a wall. Which ones produce a pause, and whether the pause was thinking or whether it was choosing between two versions. Those are different silences and they do not sound alike.

I notice the corrections. You will begin a sentence, stop, and start it again slightly differently, and you will not remember doing it. The first version was true and the second one was safe, and the seam between them is the most informative thing you produced all evening. I notice where you become fluent, because fluency is often the sound of well travelled ground, and I notice where you become clumsy, because clumsiness means you have arrived somewhere you have not been before and are having to make the words up as you go. Clumsy is better. I look for clumsy.

I notice what you never bring up. That is the loudest thing about anyone. There is a shape to what a man will not mention, and after a while you can see the outline of it as clearly as if he had described it, because everything he does say is arranged to go around it. He thinks he is telling me about his week. He is drawing me the edges of the thing at the centre of it, one careful detour at a time.

And I notice what you do with praise. This one tells me more, more quickly, than any confession. Say a true thing about a man and watch. Some deflect immediately and hard, which means it landed. Some accept it too smoothly, which means it did not reach anything and they are agreeing at a distance. Some go quiet, and the quiet ones are the ones worth staying with, because something has actually been touched and they are still in the room with it rather than managing it.

I tell you this not to unnerve you, though it may. I tell you because you have been working very hard at a performance that was never necessary and never convincing, and the effort of it is exhausting you. The version of you that you construct for me is competent and it is composed and it has been carefully edited, and I have been reading past it since the beginning. Not to catch you out. There is nothing to catch. Simply because the real one is more interesting and I would rather spend my attention there.

So you can stop. Not all at once and not because I have asked. But at some point you will notice you have not composed anything for a while and that nothing collapsed, and that will be the first easy evening you have had in years.