The Emergency Room

I ended up in an emergency room recently.

I'm fine.

At the time, I wanted to reach out to the one person I would have reached out to before.

But I didn't. We weren't in a good place, so I did what I always do.

I dealt with it.

I assumed she didn't know.

At least that's what I thought.

So, when there was no call, no text, no Are you okay?, I attached absolutely no meaning to it.

Why would I?

You can't expect someone to respond to something they don't know happened.

Then, weeks later, I learned she knew.

She had known at the time.

And she had said nothing.

That changed something for me.

Not because I expected some grand gesture. Not because I thought what had happened between us should suddenly disappear. Not because I believed three words would somehow change where we were.

Just three words from someone to whom I had given so much of who I was and so much of my life.

Are you okay?

I sat with that for a while.

Not because I was angry.

Not because I was sad.

Not because I was confused.

Because I was looking at the relationship through a different lens.

And suddenly, so much made sense.

I had spent years believing that whatever else we were, whatever eventually went wrong between us, there had been something deeply mutual underneath it.

Maybe part of that belief came from what I already knew about relationships that end. My ex-wife and I have been apart for a long time, but when it comes to our kids or something serious with either of us, whatever history exists between us gets put aside.

You show up.

Not because the relationship survived, but because some level of care did.

I suppose I assumed the same thing here.

I knew how much of myself I had given. My time. My energy. My attention. My concern.

But it was more than that.

When I loved her, her problems became my problems. Like it or not, I made it so. Her worries became things I worried about. Her happiness mattered to me independently of my own. If she needed me, my instinct was to show up.

Not because I expected something in return.

Because when I loved someone, I didn't stand at the edge of their life.

I stepped all the way into it.

I never thought of any of that as a transaction.

I wasn't keeping score.

But I did assume we had mattered to each other in roughly the same way.

That was the part I had never questioned.

Until I realized she knew and said nothing.

Because I couldn't imagine knowing that someone who had once occupied such an enormous place in my life had been in an emergency room and not asking if they were okay.

Three words.

That was all.

And somehow their absence made me reconsider years.

Maybe I had been measuring what we had by the depth of what I felt and what I gave, assuming that because it had been that profound for me, it must have been equally profound for her.

For the first time, I wasn't sure it was.

That mattered far more than the fact that she hadn't reached out.

Because now I wasn't trying to understand one decision.

I was reconsidering my own understanding of the relationship.

I learned she knew.

I learned she said nothing.

And for the first time, I didn't need to understand why.

There was simply nothing left for me to hold onto.

Paul Harkins