Little things, you know. Last week there was a sale at Somerfield’s, ten packs of Mueller yoghurt for two pounds. Two pounds! we said, looking at each other as though we were faced with the miraculous secret of life. We gathered up the packs, making sure to take a variety, but I noticed the kind I liked best, apricot, wasn’t there, and I remarked on this fact sadly.
I didn’t think he was listening – rather, that he was giving especial attention, because he always does listen – but yesterday when he got back from the store I looked in the refrigerator and there I found a small heap of apricot yoghurt packs. Plundered treasure, just for me.
Or, say, how I’ve been anxious and addled and shot through with ambivalence lately. I haven’t realized just how much he’s had to listen to my droning on and on about The State of Applications. After I finish going on about it, I wind up feeling secure and happy. Why is that? He maintains constant levels of It’s-Going-To-Be-All-Right and Try-And-Cheer-Up. Which isn’t always what you want to hear in the moment, but is always what you want to come away with.
Or smaller again. There are two cats here in this house, and the way he talks to them, and the way the more sociable of the two adores him and follows him around the house and sits on him and gets a head rub and purrs, content, pleased to be so nicely treated by a human.
Rather, it’s that I feel happy, lighter, unconcerned about the future because by god it will be all right. It’s the distinct feeling of comfort, of coming home, of being listened to and understood, of having fears allayed, of being loved. And it’s all down to him.
