I went to see Ben because I needed to say the whole thing aloud to someone who wouldn’t let me polish it. My brother listened without interrupting, then summarized my problem in one brutally plain sentence: Maya wanted me to stop treating the word girlfriend like the setup to a joke. I told him that was reductive, and he said it was accurate. He had known me too long to be impressed by the vocabulary I used when I didn’t like what I was hearing.
“Maya isn’t a poker chip,” he said. “She gets to choose the risk too.” I looked toward the window, irritated by how closely his answer resembled Noah’s, and he let me sit with that before continuing. Nobody was asking me to stop caring whether it worked, he explained; I simply didn’t get certainty before I decided to participate. At some point, loving her required letting her stand beside me as an equal in the uncertainty.
