WHAT I HAVEN'T SAID YET

A Catalog

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I. WHAT I KEEP CHECKING FOR

I have become a person who reads the pause between a message sent and a message received the way I used to read faces in a house where the faces meant something and the something was usually about me and not in a generous way.

This is not that.

I know this is not that.

And still I am checking. Still holding the evidence up to the light the way you hold a thing to see if it's real, the way you do that because once you held something and it wasn't.

You answer quickly. You answer like someone who wanted to answer. And I don't know what to do with that because I was taught that wanting was performance and performance was currency and currency always had conditions.

You don't seem to have conditions.

That's what I can't figure out. What you want from this. Whether you want from this. Whether want is even the word you're using or whether you're just here the way you're just here and I'm the one building a cathedral out of the fact of you.

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II. WHAT YOU ARE, SPECIFICALLY

Not a type.

That's the first thing.

I have a history of types. A history of knowing what I was walking into before I walked into it, of choosing the familiar architecture because at least I knew where the walls were, at least I knew which rooms to avoid.

You are not a type.

You are a specific person who finds the same frequencies I find and doesn't need to explain why and doesn't.

I don't know what to do with a specific person.

I know what to do with familiar architecture. I know how to navigate rooms I've been told to avoid. I know how to make myself small in a house that has opinions about my size.

I don't know what to do with someone who seems to want me to take up space.

I'm trying to learn. That's the most I can tell you. I'm trying to learn what it looks like to be exactly as much as I am in the presence of a person who might want exactly that.

Might.

That's the word I'm still living in.

Might.

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III. FREQUENCY

Here is what I'm afraid of:

That I'm the only one sitting with it for twenty minutes.

That you send the song and move on the way you move on from sending a song, the way it's a thing you do, a small and easy thing, a reaching out that doesn't mean what I have decided it means.

That I am building something out of material you didn't intend to be material.

That the frequency I keep finding is one I'm finding alone, which would mean it isn't a frequency, which would mean it's just me, receiving signal from static because I want signal because I have been in the static long enough that finding something clear in the noise makes me want to call it music.

Maybe it is music. Maybe I'm not imagining it.

Maybe you sit with it too, in your own version of twenty minutes, and you just don't say so yet, the way I'm not saying so yet, the way we're both here in the particular territory of two people who hear the same thing and don't explain it

and don't.

Maybe.

I hope maybe.

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IV. WHAT I WANT TO SAY AND DON'T

There's a version of this where I just tell you.

Where I say: I think about you the way I think about a song that found me at exactly the right moment, which is to say I didn't go looking for it and now I can't unhear it and I don't want to.

There's a version where I say: you are the first person in a long time who has made me feel like being known is not the same as being vulnerable to something.

There's a version where I say it plainly:

I like you. I want more of this. I want to know if you do too.

But the version I'm actually in is the one where I write it down, where I put it in the catalog, where the catalog lives here and here is not in front of you because in front of you I am still learning how to trust that what I want to say won't become evidence in a case I didn't know was being built.

I know you are not the house.

I know.

I'm just still learning the difference between knowing and believing.

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V. WHAT I'M ASKING (WITHOUT ASKING)

I'm not asking you to confirm it.

I'm not asking you to name the thing because I don't know how to trust a name given before a thing is ready to hold it.

What I'm asking is this:

Keep sending the songs.

Keep being the version of yourself you don't seem to notice you're being, the one without an agenda, the one that just shows up in the particular way you show up and doesn't perform anything and doesn't have to.

Because what you are is revising me. And I don't want to stop being revised.

I want to find out who I am on the other side of the house, where the walls don't have opinions, where someone is just there and just being and that's enough.

I want to find that out with you.

If that's something you want too, you don't have to say so.

Just keep being.

I'll keep paying attention.

That's how we'll know.