Song of Late the Stranger

Misunderstanding is a constant feature of intimate relationships. Two people who have known each other for decades continue to misread each other in small and large ways. The question is not whether misunderstanding will occur but how it will be repaired when it does. It was easy to miss, and it was impossible to forget. It was a detail that acquired meaning after the fact.

Trust is not a feeling but a practice. The feeling of trusting someone may or may not reflect reality; the practice of extending trust, of behaving toward another person as though they are reliable and honest, is the actual thing. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable and a willingness to be occasionally wrong. This memory would return in another season. It was the sort of thing that took up more space in their mind than it seemed it should.

The particular difficulty of loving someone well is that it requires attending to who they actually are rather than who you thought they were or who you would like them to be. The idealisation that characterises early romantic feeling is not the same as love; love requires the revision of the idealisation in light of reality. For a moment, the ordinary felt profound. It was a quiet thing, but it shaped what came next.

The story continues. Most of it is ordinary, which is to say, most of it is what life is made of. The extraordinary moments receive more attention but may not, in the end, be more important. The feeling of it lingered in the back of her mind. It was the sentence they would remember when the story was retold.