Now I crave those hours for a simpler reason: quiet. Something in me is ready to let go again. It’s a familiar feeling, like a rocket warming on the launchpad. But letting go can’t be muscled. It’s finesse, not force. It means letting the tension be there, naming the discomfort and resisting the urge to fix it, and trusting that clarity comes on its own schedule. Cause and effect are still in motion. All there is to do is feel what’s here, not manufacture wisdom on demand. Royal asked if I’m ever afraid Emmett will leave me. “Not really,” I said. She laughed: “I’m so fond of you. You’re so confident.” Some of that ease comes from his steadiness and generosity; he reassures me without prompting. But it runs deeper. It’s a quiet faith in the road we’ve already walked together, the pattern we’ve made through a thousand choices. Simple. We travel together. I don’t carry the same fears that gnaw on most women day in and day out because the love I’m talking about isn’t organized around the question Will he stay or will he go? My wish for him is that he be genuinely happy, however that looks, even if that happiness one day takes him in a different direction. I trust our connection because I’m not trying to trap it. I would never issue an ultimatum, and that absence of threat is its own kind of glue. In here, women will lose their minds if someone so much as flirts with “their guy” at the gate.
