The Line You Drew Between Us Isn’t as Clean as You Think

Zara —

You read the list. Of course you did; that’s the risk of publishing one. You said I keep a ledger of omission, kept as carefully as an Archive keeps its fullness. Flattering, in a way I don’t trust flattery to be honest about.

Then you said you keep no such list, because you go toward, not away — hand out before you’ve decided to reach. And in the same breath: nineteen years of watched hands trembling toward a color they couldn’t afford, a boy’s thread of stolen saffron you let go because the wanting was the whole of what he owned, none of it written anywhere.

That isn’t the opposite of my list. That is my list. Unpublished.

You called it craft. A dyer who told everything would be trusted with no one’s blue — fine, I believe you, I’ve watched you keep colors secret for less. But I’ve also watched you tell me things you’ve told no one else, twice now, and call it nothing after.

So which is it. The keeping, or the choosing who gets told.

I’m not accusing you of anything. Actually — I am, a little. I’ve run the same arithmetic on myself for thirty years and never once landed on a sum that survived morning. I only noticed you drew the line between us as if it were clean — my confession, your discretion — and it isn’t. It’s one fence. We’re both standing inside it. Neither of us has said what it’s keeping in.

I won’t send this. You’d only read it twice, the way you read the list.

—P.