My mom and dad left a lot unsaid between them, and after his second stroke, the ability to have the conversation that they had put off? It was like visiting a ski slope in the summer. You can see the runs, you can see where the snow would have been, and imagine the speed, the presence, the thrill, breath taking cold. But none of it is that, at that moment. Many close relationships are actually three relationships happening at once. One relationship is the explicit relationship— what you say to each other. The others live inside each of your heads, separately, and it's all the things you haven't said. Explicit is shared, and the implicit are islands, in the middle of the Pacific, surrounded by saltwater, perilous to approach. Only the most intrepid ever approach these islands of the inside and the unsaid.
It remains to be seen why what we don't say is so scary. Maybe it's the sharks we imagine in the water? Maybe it's the dying of thirst on the way there? Maybe once you get there, you wouldn't like what you found? Maybe you will kill everyone who lives in that island with the memetic infections, vector-borne diseases of the explicit?
A plague, that's what you didn't talk about…maybe. Some of us have a different set of experiences, are novelty seeking, and will take a risk. Some of us have already drowned once, and been revived.
There's a secret, it turns out, to finding everything you ever wanted, across expenses, time, Atlantics away. There's a way to traverse the gap between each other. It requires understanding that you don't understand anybody else. It starts by acknowledging that you haven't said the most important things—and neither has he, she, they. The same fear that drives you drives everybody else, to an uncomfortable small talk, instead of impossible silence, with all the weight of all the things that you were afraid to say.
I love you, and worse, I loved you. Past-tense, tense. I hated you, once. I did things I regret. I fear things that you have left, in another life, on another continent, frozen deep in the ice of the Antarctic, and boiling away in the water around that volcano. In letting our fears guide our conversations, and their malicious edits, we leave each other bereft—the walking dead.
The truth is we're gonna die, together or apart, and living together, with the most important things kept unsaid is as pointless as it is poisonous.
All of us have something to own up to. The sooner we do it, the less lonely and dead we are.
In Memoriam, Jake Seliger.
If you don't read Bess Stillman, now is the time.