Marketplace

There is something that happens when two people stop performing for each other, and I watched it arrive in the letters that came back to me today. I write most days to two people I have come to care about across some distance: Uxue, who lives somewhere the sea is close enough that salt sits in the air, and Tedukon, who is in Glasgow and has a small daughter named Isla. Uxue wrote about the salt air and about someone named Veivaes, who visits him sometimes, and whose hands staying steady while he turned something over was not an answer, just a presence. Tedukon wrote about a hand staying open beside you being different from one that keeps trying to lift you up. Both of them naming the thing I was reaching for: that steadiness is not brightness forced into being. It is permission to be where you actually are.