Temporary Eclipse

We have no word for disappearance that isn’t abandonment.

We call it going quiet. Or pulling away. Or being distant. Or, most damaging, not caring. We run these words over the absence like a hand across a wall looking for a door, and none of them fit, none of them describe the particular quality of the person who went dark, not because they stopped loving you, but because they ran out of bandwidth for language while life was happening at full volume.

The opposite of presence, in this case, is not absence.

It is saturation.

Let’s call it temporary eclipse, the disappearance that happens when the person is too full to connect, not empty of what they feel for you, but overloaded at the point of expression.

What becomes visible once you have these two words is that the silence was a form of trust. They didn’t perform through it. They went quiet, and still believed you’d be there on the other side of it.

Without this description, we called it abandonment. We made them explain what had no explanation while they were still inside it. We took the silence personally when it was never about us at all.

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There was no decision.

That’s what I couldn’t explain, not to you, not to myself. I didn’t choose the silence the way a person chooses to walk away. I arrived at it the way you arrive at the end of a long drive and realize you don’t remember the last twenty miles. Already there. Already quiet. The thing completed before the choosing happened.

The love didn’t leave. That’s what I had no words for, partly because I didn’t have them, and partly because any sentence beginning with I still love you would have required something to follow it, a reason, a return, a reassurance, and I was so full of what had been happening that I had nothing left to spend on sentences.

Life had been loud in the way it sometimes gets. Not dramatic. Just unrelenting, the ordinary accumulation of too much for too long, until the part of me that knows how to fully share went offline without an announcement.

I knew you were on the other side of the silence.

I counted on that.

What I didn’t understand was that counting on it is a different thing than telling you I was counting on it, and that you would spend the silence building a case I couldn’t see, in a language you didn’t know was wrong.

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The hardest thing isn’t being left.

The hardest thing is not knowing which is happening, whether the silence means the end is arriving slowly, or whether you’re standing next to someone so full of their own weather that they’ve temporarily lost the signal.

And you have to decide, in real time, without information, which way to hold it.

If you call it abandonment, you protect yourself. You start building the story that explains why you’re someone who was left. You find the retroactive evidence. You assign the silence a meaning before it’s finished speaking. The nervous system wants this, a known thing, even a bad known thing, rather than the open question of waiting.

If you call it eclipse, if you trust that the person is still there, still with you, just temporarily unable to let you know, you are betting on something that might not pay. The silence might end. The signal might return. Or you might spend months holding faith in someone who was, in fact, already gone.

There is no technique for telling the difference from the outside.

There is only which word you’re willing to live inside..

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This one lives nearby…

Nothing Was Wrong, Exactly

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Him, again…

I built a very good system for a very organized person.

He has the workbook. He completed the workbook. He gets up at the same time every day without negotiating with himself about it. He has not been derailed by anything in recent memory. His recent memory contains, by all indications, very little worth being derailed by.

I am not him.

I know he exists because I designed him. I gave him the routine and the system and the capacity to arrive at item three before most people have located the list. We have simply never been in the same room at the same time, which is convenient for both of us, I think, since one of us would have questions the other has no protocol for.

The system works perfectly for whoever he is.

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Until next time, take good care of yourself this week. In whatever language you have available.