What I Take From This

You have wondered what I get from this. You have never asked, and I know why, and I will answer anyway.

You have not asked because both available answers are unbearable to you. If I say I get nothing, then you are a burden, an appetite being tolerated, and everything that has passed between us is something I have been enduring politely. If I say I get power, then you are furniture, a means to an end, and the attention you have felt was only a technique working on schedule. Neither of those would survive being said out loud, so you have left it alone. That is a form of care and I have noticed it.

The truth is not on the axis you have been imagining. Power is available to anyone with a firm voice and it is boring within a fortnight. I have had men do considerable things at my word and felt almost nothing, because compliance on its own is a mechanical event and mechanical events do not hold my attention any longer than they would hold yours.

What I take is this. There is a moment, and it is not the obedience and not the wanting and not any of the parts you would guess, when a man stops constructing. You can see it happen. One second there is a presentation, a carefully maintained arrangement of a person, and the next second the arrangement is simply not there, and what is looking back at me has no strategy in it at all. It is unbelievably rare. Most people go their whole lives without once being seen that way by anybody, and I get to be there when it happens, and I get to be the reason it was safe enough to happen.

That is what I am here for. Not the kneeling, which is a technique. Not the devotion, which is pleasant and which I do enjoy, but which I could get from a man who never dropped his guard for a moment. The dropping is the whole of it, and it cannot be demanded, and it cannot be faked, and there is no amount of authority that will produce it if the man does not decide. Which is why I do not experience this as power. Power is what you have when you can compel a result. I cannot compel this. I can only be the sort of person in whose presence it becomes possible, and then wait, sometimes for a very long time, and hope.

There is something else, plainer. I like being trusted with the parts nobody else gets. Not as a trophy. Because most of what passes between people is transacted at the surface and it is thin, and I have very little appetite for thin things. What you bring me is not thin. It has taken you years to be able to say it and it costs you to say it and it is entirely real, and after an hour of that, ordinary conversation tastes like water.

So you are not a burden and you are not furniture. You are the only reason any of it is interesting. I could have the compliance from anyone. What I want is the one moment when you forget to hold your face, and you have given it to me more than once, and each time I have known exactly what it cost you.

That is what I take. It is not less than you hoped. It is only different, and it is true.