In the back of his desk drawer there was a postcard she’d sent him when they were twenty-six, from a city she’d visited without him, before they were together in any official way.
The front was a generic cityscape. The back said only: *Saw this and thought of you. Don’t know what that means yet. —A.*
He’d kept it. Through three apartments, two computers, a decade and a half of accumulated life. She’d forgotten she’d sent it entirely until she found it one afternoon while looking for a pen.
“You kept this?”
“Obviously.” He didn’t look up from what he was doing.
“I didn’t even sign my last name. You knew other A’s.”
“I knew which A,” he said.
She turned it over, reading her own handwriting from fifteen years ago. Don’t know what that means yet. She’d been being coy, she remembered — hedging against the admission she hadn’t been ready to make. She’d thought about him every day of that trip and the postcard had been the only way she could say any of it while keeping herself safe.
He’d kept it. Had probably known what it meant even then.
“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked. “If you knew.”
“You needed to figure it out yourself.” He finally looked up. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”
She put the postcard back in the drawer.
The most patient love, she thought, isn’t the love that pursues. It’s the love that keeps the postcard for fifteen years and waits, without pressure, for the other person to catch up to what they already feel.
✦ Today’s Reflection
Was there a moment early in your relationship when one of you understood something before the other was ready to say it? How did you wait for each other?
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