Hannah, forty minutes

Hannah rang about Dad and we ended up talking for forty minutes, which we have not done in about two years. Normally we are a four-exchange text relationship with a phone call at Christmas. She said she thinks about moving back all the time. I was genuinely shocked. I have had her filed as settled since roughly 2019 — the house, the two kids, Theo's job, the whole apparatus of a life that has made its decisions. And she has apparently had me filed as the one who got out, the one with the career and the interesting town and no small people climbing on her, and has been slightly envious of that in a way she has never said. Both of us have been carrying a version of the other one that is years out of date, and protecting her from mine while she protected me from hers. She said something near the end that I have not been able to put down. She said, I am tired in a way that sleep does not touch, and I cannot say that to anybody because I chose it. And I said, you can say it to me. And she said, can I though. That landed properly. Because the honest answer is that for about six years I have not been somebody she could say that to, because every time she told me something hard about her life I heard it as a report from the country I had not emigrated to, and I think she could feel me doing that.

Because I know what I did with it the last few times. She would say something about being flattened and I would say something encouraging and slightly brisk, and then get off the phone. I was not being unkind. I was being efficient, which from the other end is the same thing.