21. Maya
Maya
"Priya Voices the Fear"
She calls me the Monday after the exhibition and she starts the way Priya starts hard conversations: with a quiet that means she's had the conversation in her head already and is deciding which part to begin with.
"He came," she says.
"He came."
"I know. I saw." She pauses. "How was it?"
"He stood in front of my work for a long time," I say. "He didn't say the wrong things. He asked me which piece I liked best and why."
"And?"
"And I told him."
"And how was that?"
I sit down on my couch. My small couch, in my small apartment, with the afternoon light coming in through the west window and the sound of someone's music drifting up from below the bookshop.
"It was good," I say. "It was strange and good.
He felt different. He looked at my work the way someone looks at something they actually see. "
Priya is quiet for a moment.
Then she says: "I have to say something you're not going to want to hear."
"Go ahead."
"What if he's only like this because you left?"
I look at my lap.
"I'm not being mean," she says. "I'm asking the serious version of the question.
He's in therapy. He's writing you letters.
He came to your exhibition. All of that is real and all of that is different from who he was six months ago.
But what if — what if it's the absence that's doing that?
What if you go back and the house is full again and the routine reasserts itself and slowly, without anyone meaning for it to happen, he goes back to who he was? "
I don't answer right away.
"How do you know the difference," she says, "between a man who has genuinely changed and a man who has learned to perform change?"
I close my eyes. "I don't," I say. "Not yet."
"That's what I thought."
"I know."
She takes a breath. "I'm not telling you not to try.
I love you both, in different ways, and I remember who he was when you met him and some of that person is genuinely worth trying for.
I'm just saying — go slow. Make him prove it.
Not in the dramatic sense. In the daily sense, in the ordinary sense, in all the ordinary moments where he always used to fail. "
"He'll have to prove it in the life we actually live," I say. "Not in the crisis version of himself."
"Yes," she says. "Exactly."
I open my sketchbook after we hang up. I write at the top of a blank page: How do I know?
I sit with the question.
I don't have the answer yet. I'm not sure the answer is a thing you find so much as a thing you watch for.
But the question itself feels important. It feels like something I should hold clearly in front of me, not as a wall against him but as a lantern into the path.
How do I know?
I write it down and leave the page blank around it. That feels right.