Nathan and I will walk it together. This is what I’m planning for. The rest will unfold from there, or it won’t, and either way I’ll know more than I know now.
That’s what I have. That, and the concrete fact of today, which is a Tuesday morning in December and there’s frost on the grass and I have a cup of coffee I made myself, and for right now, in this particular moment, I’m okay.
We’ll see what spring looks like when it gets here.
## The Particular Weight of Witnessed Neglect
There’s a concept I’ve been turning over since the trip — the idea of witnessed neglect. I don’t mean neglect in the dramatic sense; I mean the more ordinary experience of having your needs repeatedly not seen by someone who is otherwise paying attention. It’s possible, I’ve come to understand, to be with someone who is very attentive in some respects and almost entirely inattentive in others, and the combination is stranger and more disorienting than straightforward inattention would be.
Nathan notices things. This is part of what makes the pattern so difficult to name. He noticed the play three years before he got the tickets. He notices when I’m tired in a way I haven’t announced. He bought, once, a particular tea I’d mentioned liking in passing months before, and had it waiting when I came home from a particularly difficult week at work. These are not the actions of a person who doesn’t pay attention.
But he had not, for years, noticed the accumulating cost of what he was asking me to carry. Or — more accurately, because I think he noticed it in flashes and then managed himself back to not-noticing — he hadn’t let the noticing become information he acted on.