8 posts
You're in the car. Nobody is talking. The radio is on but neither of you is listening because the air in the vehicle has changed composition. You did something. You know you did something because you can feel it.
You apologized. You used the word 'sorry.' You made eye contact. You may have even meant it. And it didn't work.
Pay attention to the next argument you witness. Not the words. The music. The pace, the volume, the rhythm. They sound identical.
You said the right thing. It was thoughtful. It was measured. And it landed like a brick through a window because you said it at 11 PM after both of you had been awake since 6 AM.
Six words. One question. Zero correct answers. What follows is a negotiation so predictable it could be scripted, so universal it transcends culture, and so frustrating that entire relationships have been quietly evaluated based on how two people navigate it.
English has roughly 170,000 words in current use. That should be more than enough to say what you mean. It is not.
This is a memorial for all the sentences that never made it to the end. The half-thoughts. The almost-points. The 'what I was going to say was' that trails off into nothing.
You're about to have this fight tonight. Maybe not tonight. But soon. And it's going to be about something incredibly stupid, and it's going to feel like it's about everything.