He made her playlists. Not for occasions — not birthday playlists or anniversary playlists or playlists themed around trips. Just playlists. Regular, unsolicited, titled in the lowercase way of someone who didn’t want to make them a bigger deal than they were.
*things for a thursday**for when you’re driving and it’s raining**this one is sort of about the sea*
She’d listen to them in her earphones on commutes, at her desk, on the mornings she walked instead of taking the bus. Some songs she knew. Some she didn’t. All of them, she’d come to understand, were a small map of what he’d been thinking about, what he’d heard, what he’d wanted to give her without knowing quite how to say it in words.
“How do you decide what goes in?” she asked once.
“I think about what fits you,” Tobias said. “Or what fits a particular version of you. The driving-in-the-rain version, the early-morning version.” He shrugged. “I hear something and I think: she’d move differently when this plays. So I send it.”
She’d been listening to one this morning — *for when you’re tired and it’s almost over* — on the tail end of a difficult week. Third track in, something she hadn’t heard before, something so exactly right for what she was feeling that she’d had to take her earbuds out and just sit with it.
She’d texted him: *third track. how did you know.*
He’d replied: *because I know you.*
Because I know you. Four words that could have been dismissive or vague but weren’t, because he’d been proving them, one curated song at a time, for years.
✦ Today’s Reflection
How does your partner express something emotionally that they find difficult to put into direct words — and have you learned to receive it in that form?
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