No Lock

I returned home from a family reunion and took time off to prepare a summary report for my Sir. I capped each part at two pages, because two pages is what a busy man can read on a phone between other obligations. I wanted him to have the weekend without having to decipher or decode it: what I played, with whom, what I thought, and in the order I thought it. I had incorporated over 20 pages of my pocket journal, 3 days of unsent text messages, and a conviction that the noise could be filtered into signal.

Three parts of one report. One told the weekend as an arc from prodigal stranger to family member. One was a play report, scene by scene, with counts. One was about reading the room, whic is to say about the last exchange with him wheere I was accused of not being able to read one. I revised them twice each. By Tuesday I had a document that I felt was clean and sent it.

Then I waited.

The waiting is the part I like least about myself. A report is an offering, and an offering that sits without feedback starts to feel like a verdict. Days went by. I watched him answer other people. I watched him attend to work, to his trip to another country, to the parts of his life that do not include me, and I felt something I can only call jealousy, though it embarrasses me to write it down. He was living his life, which is exactly what I would want for him on any other week. Knowing that did not help.

The anguish was specific. I had done the thing I am always told to do: slow down, write it out, say it plainly. Plainness, it turned out, did not buy a faster reply.
The report went stale before he could read it. Within a week the relationships it described had already evolved. The men I wrote about had become something slightly different to me, and I to them. The questions I asked him had begun to change shape on their own. A weekend like BAW does not end on the Sunday trip home. It keeps rearranging itself in the group chats and the follow-up texts and the long post event drop, well after the badges go in a drawer.

I had tried to do to my own heart what planners try to do to an economy: gather the scattered knowledge into one tidy document and hand it upward. But the knowledge that mattered lived in moving relationships, and a report is a photograph of a river. My incredulity at his delay was, I suspect, incredulity at my own conceit (that two page snapshots could hold still long enough to be answered).
Here is the harder part. During the weekend I noticed that he acknowledged someone else's message in a group chat at half past midnight and let mine sit. I read it as a signal, and I resented it. In the time since, I have done the same thing. I have used the public room to send a private message, which is the cowardly way to say anything at all. I am not proud of it, but I recognized the move because I had learned it from the receiving end.
His life does not pause for my journaling. He has also been carrying a loss of his own since May, and the responsibilities that come with it. A Sir owes his boy attention, but he does not owe him a reply on a fixed schedule. What I call delay may have been care: not wanting to answer a long, raw document with a short, tired text. Silence can be a way of taking something seriously and treating a response as a deliberate action.

I treated the silence as I always do, with the worst possible interpretation. I treated his last minute request to care for his dog as a burden and annoyance due to other pre planned obligations. I treated his comments about getting to my report eventually with growing irritation as the dyanmism of the report made it less and less relevant with every passing group chat text. I removed a device that I had a key for and have not put it back on since Sunday...

The only thing that remains is the collar. It did not change when the report went stale or when the chat went quiet. It is the only fact from that weekend still true in exactly the same form.
It has no lock. I can take it off. So can he, by a word, or by no word at all. For a while that made it feel frail to me, a symbol held on by habit and nothing else. I am starting to think the missing lock is the point. A locked collar would stay on whatever either of us did. This one stays only because I keep choosing it, on the days we answer each other and on the days we don't.

I suspect I will be returning it sooner rather than later... but the ball is entirely in his court and my request for better communication is still left unanswered.