Reader, He Didn’t Study Me

A quiet letter to the one that didn't flinch at the draft.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

There are people who love the polished version of me. It’s the one that’s been through three edits and one long bath, sanitised and scrubbed before being buffed up for presentation. Those people admire the story once it’s been structured, its arcs have been defined, and the syntax has tightened like a Versailles corset. They call it lots of wonderful things. They mean it too, although not maliciously. It’s meant in the way people mean it’s nice to look at a view from a safe distance. They don’t want to step too close to the edge. These are people with only surface interactions with me in real life: my students, my colleagues, or the people I regularly see in the same places that I also frequent.

Then, there are those who read you in draft form.

He’s read me like that.

When Anne Carson wrote, “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing,” I thought of him immediately. Long after I’d abandoned the narrative I’d built around myself and long after the clever façades cracked and the plotlines collapsed, he stayed. He kept reading.

You see, he saw the parenthetical thoughts, and the crossed-out metaphors, and the footnotes that never made it into the final cut. He walked into rooms I’ve written out of my official record whilst holding my hand. He stood beside me in the blank spaces whilst I was still deciding on the story, and he’s stayed through the parts too jagged to shape into paragraphs, too.

I once told him that I collect fragments. I told him about the notebooks, the novels, and the way that I hoard my opinions in my email inbox. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t ask why I don’t “just finish things”. He requested that I show him where I keep them. That felt like the kindest thing anyone had ever asked me.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Most days, we don’t spend them in grand gestures, do we? We spend them in the quiet intervals: feeding the dog while the kettle hisses in the morning, or watching something odd on television whilst the cat sings the song of his people in a bid to be fed again. We’re both a little too tired to make sense of it but laughing anyway.

There are sacred sacraments wrapped in mutual recognition, regardless of how mundane life is.

Maybe that’s the difference. He didn’t come for the conclusion. He stayed for the ellipses instead.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

When I reference writers in conversation, he doesn’t flinch. He nods, and sometimes he smiles that slightly crooked smile as if to say, “I don’t always get the reference, but I get you.” Have you ever experienced that with someone? It’s rarer than people think. It’s easy to fall in love with someone’s highlights reel. It’s harder to sit through their digressions.

There was an evening I still think about but not because it was romantic and not because it was cinematic. It was completely ordinary. It was November. There was a candle flickering on the mantlepiece. He made us both a cup of tea. The cat, still a kitten then, was curled up on my chest, and the dog lay at our feet. The weather was violent. He asked me what I was reading. I told him I was reading Beowulf. He nodded, asked if it was his copy, and then returned to his Yuval Noah Harari. I remember looking up at him and thinking, “This is what it means to be known without being studied."

He doesn’t try to solve me like a riddle. He doesn't treat me like a thesis. He simply lets the mystery exist in the room, like a closed book on the bedside table, waiting, without expectation, to be opened.

When Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wasn’t wrong. We also withhold stories to survive, though. There are things I haven’t said, not because I don’t trust him, but because I do. Some truths aren’t confessions: they’re currencies. I don’t need to spend them with him. I don’t need to prove anything.

I’ve watched people shift when I say too much. He didn’t shift. He leaned in.

He’s not interested in my character arc. He’s content to sit with me in the footnotes and to walk beside the half-drawn map.

Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

So, on a day like this, which is quiet, clouded, and November-heavy, I write this as a small, private thing. It’s a page folded and placed on his side of the desk we share. It’s not to mark a milestone and not to declare anything monumental, but simply to say:

Thank you for knowing the unpublished parts of me, husband.
Thank you for seeing what hasn’t been typeset.

Thank you for loving my possibilities.

🖤

Helen