I used to think that being careful meant keeping my expectations low.<\/p>\n
If I expected little, I told myself, then I couldn't be disappointed.<\/p>\n
It seemed sensible.<\/p>\n
It also made it difficult to enjoy anything that came my way.<\/p>\n
I had become so good at preparing for the worst that I sometimes treated happiness as a warning sign.<\/p>\n
When Wendell was kind, I wondered what he wasn't telling me.<\/p>\n
When he was quiet, I wondered whether he was pulling away.<\/p>\n
When he spoke about Christmas, I tried to calculate how much hope I could safely allow myself.<\/p>\n
I was tired of thinking that way.<\/p>\n
I didn't know how to stop immediately.<\/p>\n
But I was beginning to recognize the habit for what it was.<\/p>\n
Fear.<\/p>\n
Not wisdom.<\/p>\n
Fear had helped me survive some difficult days after Dwight died.<\/p>\n
It had reminded me not to rush into things I wasn't ready for.<\/p>\n
It had given me permission to stay home when the world felt too demanding.<\/p>\n
But fear had also kept me from admitting how lonely I was.<\/p>\n
It had made me ashamed of wanting companionship.<\/p>\n
And now it was making me suspicious of a man who had given me reasons to care about him.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to let fear make every decision.<\/p>\n
That didn't mean I would ignore my instincts.<\/p>\n
It meant I would listen to them without automatically treating every worry as proof.<\/p>\n
There was a difference.<\/p>\n
I thought about the garage again.<\/p>\n
The photographs had not been hidden in a locked box.<\/p>\n
The paper had not been buried somewhere I could never find it.<\/p>\n
It had been attached to a wall with two pieces of blue tape.<\/p>\n
Wendell had kept it where he could see it.<\/p>\n
That fact mattered.<\/p>\n
It suggested that whatever he was preparing was not something he wanted to erase.<\/p>\n
He had wanted to preserve it.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether the yellow paper had been on the wall for days or weeks.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether he looked at it every morning when he entered the garage.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether the words gave him courage or made him nervous.<\/p>\n
Those questions were different from the ones I had asked before.<\/p>\n
I was no longer trying to prove that he didn't trust me.<\/p>\n
I was trying to understand what mattered to him.<\/p>\n
That was a better place to begin.<\/p>\n
I still needed him to explain the house.<\/p>\n
I still needed to know why he had made me wait so long.<\/p>\n
But I was beginning to see that the answer might be more complicated than embarrassment or rejection.<\/p>\n
Sometimes people hide things because they are ashamed.<\/p>\n
Sometimes they hide them because they are afraid of losing control over something important.<\/p>\n
Sometimes they hide them because they have convinced themselves that a surprise will be ruined if the other person knows too much.<\/p>\n
None of those reasons makes secrecy harmless.<\/p>\n
But they are not all the same.<\/p>\n
I wanted to hear which reason belonged to Wendell.<\/p>\n
I also wanted to know whether he could admit that his choice had hurt me, even if he had never meant it to.<\/p>\n
So far, he had done that.<\/p>\n
I held on to that fact.<\/p>\n
One afternoon, I found myself remembering a conversation we'd had before I discovered the garage.<\/p>\n
I had asked him about his house.<\/p>\n
He had changed the subject.<\/p>\n
At the time, I had gone home feeling rejected.<\/p>\n
Now I wondered whether he had been thinking about the yellow paper and the photographs while we spoke.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had been trying not to reveal the plan.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had been afraid of giving too much away.<\/p>\n
I couldn't know.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to turn that possibility into another invented explanation.<\/p>\n
But I could acknowledge that there might have been more happening beneath his silence than I had understood.<\/p>\n
That was enough for now.<\/p>\n
I had made a decision to give him room to explain himself.<\/p>\n
I intended to keep that promise.<\/p>\n
I also intended to keep the promise I had made to myself.<\/p>\n
I would not make excuses for him forever.<\/p>\n
I would not tell myself that my questions were unreasonable just because asking them made him uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
And I would not confuse being loved with being required to wait outside.<\/p>\n
If we were going to build something together, there had to be room for both of us.<\/p>\n
I wanted Wendell to feel that he could tell me the truth without being punished for having imperfections.<\/p>\n
I also needed to feel that he trusted me enough to tell it.<\/p>\n
Neither of those things could happen if we continued pretending that nothing was wrong.<\/p>\n
I thought about that while preparing for the holiday.<\/p>\n
I didn't do anything elaborate.<\/p>\n
I simply began considering what I wanted the day to feel like.<\/p>\n
I wanted warmth.<\/p>\n
I wanted a little laughter.<\/p>\n
I wanted the freedom to miss Dwight without feeling that I had spoiled the occasion.<\/p>\n
And I wanted to see Wendell in a place that belonged to him.<\/p>\n
Not because I needed proof that he cared.<\/p>\n
Because I wanted to know the person I was growing to love.<\/p>\n
The distinction was important.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to enter his home as a detective.<\/p>\n
I wanted to enter as someone he had chosen to welcome.<\/p>\n
I wanted to sit with him without wondering whether I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.<\/p>\n
I wanted to be able to ask a question and trust that he would answer honestly, even if the answer wasn't polished.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that was too much to hope for all at once.<\/p>\n
But it didn't seem unreasonable to want it eventually.<\/p>\n
I had spent years building a life with Dwight.<\/p>\n
I knew what it meant to share a home with another person.<\/p>\n
It wasn't about having everything in common.<\/p>\n
It wasn't about agreeing on every decision.<\/p>\n
It was about knowing that the other person was willing to let you see the ordinary truth of their life.<\/p>\n
The unfinished work.<\/p>\n
The bad days.<\/p>\n
The things they were proud of.<\/p>\n
The things they wished were different.<\/p>\n
A relationship could not grow entirely on carefully selected moments.<\/p>\n
It needed ordinary honesty too.<\/p>\n
I wanted that with Wendell.<\/p>\n
And I was beginning to believe that he wanted it with me, although he had a difficult way of showing it.<\/p>\n
The thought made me smile.<\/p>\n
Then I remembered how frightened he had looked when I found the photographs.<\/p>\n
My smile faded.<\/p>\n
I still didn't know what he had been so afraid of.<\/p>\n
I could imagine several explanations, but none of them was certain.<\/p>\n
I decided to stop trying to solve the question in my head.<\/p>\n
I would wait until he was ready to tell me.<\/p>\n
Not forever.<\/p>\n
Not without boundaries.<\/p>\n
But long enough to give the conversation a chance to happen naturally.<\/p>\n
I had learned that some answers could not be hurried.<\/p>\n
I had also learned that waiting became harmful when it was the only thing one person was ever asked to do.<\/p>\n
I hoped Wendell understood that difference now.<\/p>\n
I hoped he was thinking about it too.<\/p>\n
When I went to bed that night, I found myself thinking about Christmas Eve without the same tightness in my chest.<\/p>\n
The date was approaching.<\/p>\n
I was still nervous.<\/p>\n
But beneath the nervousness, there was something I had not felt in a long time.<\/p>\n
Anticipation.<\/p>\n
I allowed myself to feel it.<\/p>\n
I didn't apologize to Dwight's photograph.<\/p>\n
I didn't tell myself I was being foolish.<\/p>\n
I simply let the feeling exist.<\/p>\n
It was a small thing.<\/p>\n
But it felt like the beginning of something.<\/p>\n
I used to think that being careful meant keeping my expectations low. If I expected little, I told myself, then I couldn't be disappointed. It seemed sensible. It also made … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36537,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36517\/revisions\/36537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}