18. Daniel
Daniel
"Asking to See Her"
Six weeks after she left, I wrote a text message eleven different times.
This is not hyperbole. I have the drafts still, half-composed and deleted, in my phone's history — I know because I scrolled back and counted them in an embarrassed, late-night accounting of my own process.
Eleven attempts, spread over four days, at finding the language that was honest without being manipulative, that communicated desire without pressure, that was — the way Dr. Cross would say it — for her and not for me.
The first three were too much. Too desperate.
The language of a man writing to fill his own silence rather than to genuinely reach out.
The fifth was too flat — would you want to get coffee sometime — like I was asking a colleague to a work meeting.
The eighth was better but still wrong. The ninth was closer.
The eleventh was this:
Would you be willing to meet for coffee? Not to convince you of anything. I just miss talking to you. Daytime, wherever you want, I can work around your schedule. And you can absolutely say no.
I read it forty times. Then I sent it.
She didn't reply immediately. I did not pick up my phone every seven minutes.
I am not going to tell you whether I picked up my phone every seven minutes.
I will say that I went for a run — the first real run I'd been on in years, since Maya used to come with me on Sunday mornings and we'd stopped when our schedules had gotten complicated — and I ran for forty-five minutes along the lakefront, past the cold water and the November-bare trees, and when I came back my phone had her response.
Okay. Saturday? There's a place on Milwaukee, Juniper Coffee. Do you know it?
I did not know it. It was clearly hers, a place she'd found in the new life she was building, and I was being invited to step into it for one hour, carefully, on her terms.
I'll find it, I wrote back. Thank you.
I went to Juniper Coffee on Friday afternoon, the day before our meeting, to see the place.
I want to be honest about this: I needed to know the layout, where the good seats were, whether it would feel neutral or too small or too loud.
I am an engineer by training and by temperament, and I manage uncertainty by gathering information.
I sat at the counter for twenty minutes with an espresso and I looked at the room and I thought: yes.
This is okay. This is a place where the conversation can be what it needs to be.
I left a tip for the barista. Went home. Made dinner. Read a book. Slept seven hours.
I was as prepared as I could make myself for something I had absolutely no control over.