What He Decided On The Way Home

The door opens at half past one and he is glowing.

Warm and loose, in the kind of mood you can read from the hallway. Meanwhile you have been in this flat for three hours with a body that stopped cooperating somewhere around eleven.

You read that. Everyone in your position reads it, and the reading is always the same: he had the better night, you turned out to be replaceable in a way that stopped being fun, and the thing you built has come back with its verdict.

Time to leave your mind, cuck. Cause here's what you're really looking at:

Somewhere between the taxi and your front door, he made a decision. He asked himself how to walk in. Triumphant, because that is what you asked for on a clear day? Or quiet and careful, in case triumphant lands wrong tonight? He may well have settled on brisk and ordinary, giving you nothing at all, which is what a man does when he is frightened of getting it wrong.

What you see in the hallway is that decision.

It is his best guess about what you need — made alone, in the back of a car, by someone who is also not at his best and who has exactly as little information as you do. Nobody ever told him. So he guessed.

You then read his guess as evidence about yourself.

And afterwards the two of you sit down next to each other and wonder why it takes so long to find the way back.

That hour is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the most ordinary hour in this entire arrangement, but we just don't name it out loud.

On Wednesday we're changing that: What is happening in each of you when that door opens, why you are both telling the truth about two completely different nights, and why the man who wanted all of this goes missing at precisely the moment you need him to speak up.

Then, later in the week, a way to stop guessing at each other — settled between you before the next time, while you can both still think straight.