Two days later

Two days and neither of us has picked it back up. That is the pattern, if I am going to be honest in here, which is ostensibly the point of it. He asks a real question about once a year — and it is about once a year, I could list them — and I let it go quiet, and then I am quietly aggrieved that he does not ask more often. He is not going to raise it again. Not out of avoidance. Because in his understanding of the exchange he asked, I said I do not know, and the respectful thing is to let me come back to it when I have something. He thinks he is giving me room. And I am reading the room as the subject being closed. Two people doing a considerate thing at each other with completely different manuals. I am going to raise it. Not tonight — he is in Hendersonville until Thursday and this is not a phone conversation. But I am writing here that I am going to, because the things that stay in my head do not happen, and I have about eleven months of evidence for that specific claim.