Primary Colours

what I wish to tell her.

Wall Mural | StableCog.

I

She wants to know what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about the sound her tea cup makes against the saucer. I'm thinking about how her hair catches light differently when she's worried versus when she's content. I'm thinking about the way she says my name when she's about to ask for something vulnerable. Wherever the gyres of my thoughts drift to, there will always be a whisper of her in it.

‎But when I try to translate these observations into words, they evaporate like breath on winter air. The gap between internal experience and external expression feels impossibly wide, like a canyon I built stone by stone over years of learning that feelings, spoken aloud, become hostages to other people's interpretations.

Last Tuesday, she asked if I still loved her. The question hung between us like smoke, and I watched her face change as my silence stretched too long. I love her—in seventeen different ways I do not have words for. But she heard the silence as an answer, and I watched her begin the small retreat that breaks my heart every time. When she's frustrated with my silence, she does this thing with her hands, she presses them flat against the kitchen counter like she's trying to ground herself. Each time, her disappointment felt like static electricity in the air, one could easily taste the metallic tang of her unspoken words. But how do you explain that you feel her emotions as physical sensations when you can barely name your own?

‎I want to tell her that intimacy terrifies me, because I feel too much, and not because I don't feel deeply. That the reason I retreat into silence isn't absence but overflow. That when she asks what's wrong, sometimes the answer is that nothing is wrong and everything is simply overwhelming and ironically, I do not have the vocabulary for the space between those two truths.

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I’ve been watching a series called Smoke, where the protagonist wrestles with the quiet war between him and his stepson. One morning, he sat the boy down with the intent to have an intimate conversation. The first words he managed were jagged and simple: “I didn’t get any hand-outs. No one showed me the ropes.”

I felt that. He didn’t say his father was absent, but every syllable ached like someone had never shown up. Maybe it was literal. Maybe it wasn’t. What the boy needed from him, what his wife hoped for, that gentleness, the guidance and the presence; none of it was native to him. It was all foreign terrain. And the weight of that unfamiliarity sat heavy on his shoulders.

“You're doing it again,” she said last night, not looking up from her book. “Doing what?” “Going somewhere I can't follow.” And she was right. I had been cataloguing the way lamplight pooled in the hollow of her collarbone instead of listening to her story about work. “I'm here,” I said. “Physically,” she replied, and the word landed like a diagnosis.

‎I, myself, was not taught the language of emotional granularity. I learned broad strokes—angry, sad, happy, fine, as though feelings were weather patterns instead of ecosystems. So when she asks me to explain the subtle difference between disappointment and grief, between loneliness and solitude, I am but a painter trying to create a sunset with only primary colours.

‎I desire her. The craving exists. It is fierce and it is constant. But so does the fear that I'll translate myself poorly, that my emotional dialect will lose something essential in transmission.

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II

‎She thinks I don't want to be known. But I want to be known, I just don't know how to be known without being consumed. Every relationship I've watched deteriorate started with the slow erosion of mystery and the gradual reduction of a person to their explained parts.

‎I grew up in a house where feelings were mostly facts to be managed and not experiences to be explored. Sadness was a problem to solve, right before it became your problem to solve. Anger was a disruption to contain, contain it before your grace expires or you risk disdain. Love was demonstrated through action rather than articulation. Tame your affections, you have a duty. So when she asks me to name the texture of my longing or the colour of my contentment, I'm working in a language I never fully learned.

‎Yet, I want her to know my silence isn't rejection. I want her to know it is gestation. I am pausing between the question and answer where I'm sorting through layers of conditioning to find something authentic within me. It's not that I don't want to give her access to my inner landscape. It's that I'm still learning how to read the map myself.

‎I call her Lilly of my Valley. The way she catches my carelessly flung words and toss them back as constellations. The way she makes my scrambled thoughts sound like jazz. The way she collects my barely articulated longings like artifacts. I also like to think we approach intimacy from opposite directions. She moves from feeling to word and translates her emotional experience into language. I move from word to feeling, and use language to excavate what I didn't know I was experiencing. We're both archaeologists, but she's digging up artifacts while I'm still learning they exist. I am trying. We both are.

Yesterday, I tried something different. When she asked what I was thinking, instead of deflecting, I said: I'm thinking about how your voice changes when you're trying not to cry, and how that makes me want to build a fortress around you, but I don't know if you want protection or participation. She was quiet for a long moment, then said, “That's the most you've said about your feelings in months.”

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‎This craving to be understood runs so deep it feels cellular. But so does the terror of being misunderstood, reduced, or worse, understood too completely. Some evenings, when she's reading and I'm pretending to work, I practice sentences in my head like prayer. Maybe tomorrow I'll say one aloud.

This hill to leave something sacred and unexplored, I hope I do not die on it.

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