The Color Sanguine

This week I have been hard at work plumbing the depths. I sifted through years of correspondence, pored over pictures, marinated in memories from over three decades ago. Some of what I found startled me.

I hold grudges. That one evening in Feb 2001 when I stood at the intersection of MG Road and Brigade Road for over three hours, waiting for the man whom I would eventually marry. It was, as the young ones now call it, a red flag. Over the years there have been vermillion, crimson, carmine, maroon and sanguine flags. I took note, marked a notch on some yardstick in my head, and marched on.

Last week, well past midnight, I sat in the study with the inbox open and went looking for the arc of our marriage, twenty five years of it.

What I found was not what I went in for. I had the search trained on the absences, the proof of everything I went without. The archive kept handing me the opposite.

The night he line-edited 180 pages of my novel and wrote I am proud of you at the end of it. The unprompted I love you, sitting in a thread by itself. The line after an ordinary evening.

“The chat last evening while folding clothes made me so cozy and happy. I love you.”

And there, below it, what I had sent back.

🤔

That is the emoji. A man says I love you impulsively, and I answer with a face that is thinking it over.

I scrolled for a long time before it all sank in. Some of what I went without, he was offering in a language I had already decided didn’t count.

It hit hard because it was true. The language I was fluent in, the one I was most conversational best in, was alien to him. He knew words. He could parse what I said. Under duress he could even mimic what I wanted. But it was not a language he dreamed in, not one he was at home in.

What I had not considered, in the years of keeping count, was that I might be the one who could not read.

His love lurks in the ordinary, in the everyday humdrum life. In the chat while the clothes get folded. I filed that under familial. Not romantic. I was holding out for pursuit in an alien language, the reader, the courter, the one who chooses you out loud, and the whole time he was choosing me in a lexicon he was fluent in, the one I marked as a flag because it was not familiar.

Receiving is the verb I have never been good at.

So, twenty-five years in, I am standing at the cusp of yet another decision. Learn a new language. Be forgiving of the lack of cadence in how we communicate. Treat this as an adventure. Given my penchant for languages and my love of learning, it is clear which way I am headed.

The romance I missed and the love I could not quite take in may be partly the same thing.

He is asleep upstairs. There is a manuscript calling out to me. I’ll go.

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