Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 37: The Way Home

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My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 37: The Way Home · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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You came home awake. I was a little afraid you
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wouldn't, that the trip would wear off at the
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door, the way trips do. It's not going to wear
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off, I said. I decided, on the threshold, with
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the bag still in my hands. My Playful Wife, Episode
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37, The Way Home, written by Mia. We flew home
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on a Sunday and Mira, who books the next visit
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before you have left the first, had already booked
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the next visit before we left the first. She
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did it at the airport, openly, holding her phone
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up so we could see the screen, daring us to object.
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A date in the spring, the four of us again, our
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city this time, our table. There was a time when
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a date in the spring with my brother and it would
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have been a thing I agreed to vaguely. and then
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quietly let die, the way you let die the plans
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you make with people you are not sure you want
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in your life. I did not let this one die. I looked
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at the date on Mira's screen, and I felt something
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I had not felt about my brother in 15 years,
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which was a simple, uncomplicated wish for the
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date to come sooner. Book it, I said. Book all
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of them. Book the whole year. And Mira, who expresses
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love by removing logistics from the lives of
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the people she loves, smiled the satisfied smile
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of a woman whose entire theology has just been
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confirmed and booked it. The goodbye was an ordinary
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goodbye, which is to say it was a miracle. My
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brother hugged me at the security line, the same
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uncomplicated thump of a hug I was still learning
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to expect from him, and said, don't be a stranger.
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And the phrase, which is the most worn -out goodbye
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in the language, landed on me with unexpected
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weight, because we had been strangers, precisely,
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for a decade, strangers with the same parents.
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And the casual instruction not to be one again
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was in fact the whole treaty between us, spoken
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in the offhand idiom our family uses for the
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things too. Large to say directly. Our family
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has always done this. communicated its largest
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feelings through its smallest, most disposable
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phrases, as though the love were too dangerous
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to handle barehanded and had to be wrapped in
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the insulation of cliché before it could be passed
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from one of us to another. I used to count it
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a failure, this inability of ours to simply say
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the thing. I have made my peace with it. Not
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every family loves in the same register. Mine
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loves in worn -out goodbyes and offers of more
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food and the booking of return tickets, and a
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man can spend his whole life resenting the dialect
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his people love in, or he can learn, at last,
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to hear it. I won't, I said, and meant it, and
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we left him in his city, in his contented life,
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my newly recovered brother, and went to the gate.
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The flight north was the inverse of the flight
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south, and I spent most of it noticing the inversion.
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Going down, three days before, Saloni had slept
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the whole way, collapsed against the window,
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carried, emptied, a woman who needed to be unconscious
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for a while to survive her own exhaustion. Coming
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back, she did not sleep. She sat awake by the
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window with her chai going cold on the tray and
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looked out at the country sliding by underneath,
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the whole subcontinent unrolling north toward
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home, and there was a quality in her stillness
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that I had learned, over the years, to read.
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Not the stillness of depletion, which I had watched
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her carry for months, but the other stillness,
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the gathering one, the quiet of a person in whom
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something has begun, very quietly, to move. She
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was not empty anymore. I could see it from the
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next seat. The south had refilled the well, and
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the water was rising, and she sat by the window
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the whole way home with a particular faraway
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look of a maker who has started, somewhere below
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the level of words, to see the next thing. I
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did not ask her about it. I have learned that,
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too, that the rising water must not be remarked
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upon, that to say so, you're getting your ideas
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back. I can see it would be to put a bucket under
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the spring, and turn the wild private rising
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into a thing being measured and expected, and
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that the surest way to make a tentative new -making
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shy back underground is to greet its first stirrings
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with enthusiasm and questions. So I said nothing
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about the look. I just refilled her cold chai
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from the flask Mira had pressed on us, and let
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her sit in the gathering stillness, and was glad,
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privately. all the way home, to be flying north
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beside a woman in whom the tide had turned. There
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is a deep pleasure, almost a smug one, in being
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the only person on a crowded airplane who knows
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that the unremarkable woman in the window seat
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is, at this very moment, quietly beginning a
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thing that will end, a year from now, in a room
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full of strangers being undone by cloth. Nobody
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around us knew. The man across the aisle saw
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a tired passenger looking out of a window. I
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saw the first invisible stirring of an entire
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collection, the secret start of it, the part
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no one ever witnesses because it happens behind
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a face on a flight home, and I got to sit beside
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it and be its only audience and say nothing and
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guard it. And then we came home, and the home
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was exactly the same and we were not, and that
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was the whole of the thing I had to stay awake
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for. This is the part nobody warns you about
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a trip, not the leaving, which everyone romanticizes,
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but the returning, the specific strange experience
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of walking back into your own unchanged life
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carrying a changed self. The flat was exactly
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as we had left it, the same key in the same lock.
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The same particular sound the door makes. The
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same furniture in the same arrangement. The same
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books. The same faint smell of home that you
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can only smell for the first ten seconds after
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an absence before your nose forgets it again.
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The October light came in at the kitchen window
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at the angle it comes in at only in October.
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The same light. The central fact of all these
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notebooks. Indifferent to Bengaluru, indifferent
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to the four of us at a table, indifferent to
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the tide turning in my wife, offering the identical
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seven o 'clock gold it had offered the morning
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everything began, and every morning since. Nothing
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in the flat had moved, and we walked into it
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as two people who had, in four days, moved a
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great deal. The river, the old line says, is
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never the same river twice. But I have always
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thought the line gets the emphasis wrong. It
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is not mainly that the river changes, though
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it does. It is that you do. You come home to
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the identical flat, the unchanged rooms, the
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same light, the same watering can on the same
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balcony where a man once walked out one version
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of himself and walked back another. And the sameness
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of it all is a kind of test. A mirror held up
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to whatever has shifted in you, because the only
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variable in the equation is yourself. A changed
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person in an unchanged home is the purest possible
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measurement of the change. The flat had not moved
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an inch, and so the flat could tell me exactly
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how far I had. And it told me a great deal. It
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told me that the man who had left for the airport
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four days before, tired and frayed and braced
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for a duty visit to a brother he was not sure
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he wanted to see, was not quite the man who had
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walked back in. The flat was the same, and so
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every difference was mine, legible, undeniable,
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written in the gap between how these rooms had
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felt on the way out and how they felt now. We
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are not given many honest mirrors in a life.
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Most of what we use to measure ourselves is moving
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to, changing alongside us, so that we never quite
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catch the drift. An unchanged home, walked back
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into, is one of the few fixed points a person
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is ever handed, and it does not flatter, and
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it does not lie. But here was the danger, and
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I named it to myself standing in my own doorway
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with the bag still in my hands, because naming
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the danger is the only defense I have ever found
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against it, that the home would eat the change.
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It is a real thing, this. You go away, and you
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wake up. A trip, a retreat, a few days in a brother's
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city, some interval outside the grooves your
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life has worn into you. And for a while you are
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more present, more awake, more able to see, because
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the unfamiliar forces your eyes open the way
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the familiar lulls them shut. And then you come
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home, and the grooves are still there, waiting,
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exactly the shape of you, and within a day, within
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an afternoon sometimes, you have slid back down
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into them, and the awakeness the trip bought
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you evaporates on the threshold of your own front
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door, and by Tuesday you are nodding at the kitchen
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table again, sleepwalking through the very life
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you spent four days remembering how to love.
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The home is the most powerful sleeping draft
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there is. Familiarity is gravity, and the renewal
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you carry back from anywhere is a fragile, volatile
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thing, and the open door of your own unchanged
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home is precisely where it is most likely to
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spill. I have watched it happen to other people,
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the spill. Watched friends come back luminous
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from some trip or retreat, full of resolutions
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and clarity. Certain that this time it would
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be different, that this time they would hold
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the thing they had found, and watch the certainty
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drain out of them over a fortnight as the old
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life closed back over the new self like water
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over a dropped stone, until within a month they
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were exactly who they had been the whole trip
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reduced to a handful of. Photographs and a wistful
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sentence at dinner parties about how they really
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should do that sort of thing more often. I did
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not want to be that. I did not want the South
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to become a photograph and a wistful sentence.
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I was not going to let it spill. That was the
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resolution I made on the threshold, bags in hand,
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before I had even set them down, that the South
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was not going to be a holiday for my life, a
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brief permitted awakening after which I would
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return to my regularly scheduled sleep. It was
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going to be folded in. I had spent three days
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remembering how to be present at a table. I was
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going to be present at this table, my own, the
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worn one in the October light, with the same
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fierce attention I had paid my brothers. The
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trip is not the point. The trip is the rehearsal.
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The point is whether you can bring the awakeness
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home and keep it alive in the one place it is
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hardest to keep alive, which is the place you
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have seen 10 ,000 times and stopped seeing somewhere
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around the 400th. So I set down the bags, and
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instead of doing the thing I would once have
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done, unpack, sort the post, slide gratefully
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back into the grooves, I stood in my own kitchen
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and made myself look at it. Actually look. The
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way you look at a room in a brother's city you
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have never seen before. The kettle, the two cups
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on their hooks, hers and mine, the small daily
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liturgy of them, the table where a shaking man
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once sat in the dark and where, across two years,
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the same man had learned to sit in the light.
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the balcony door, and beyond at the watering
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can, and beyond at the grill and the gray -green
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tops of the neighbor's plants and the whole ordinary
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view that had been the backdrop to the most important
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morning of my life. I looked at my home as a
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tourist looks at a thing he has traveled a long
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way to see, and the looking woke it back up,
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the whole familiar room standing suddenly visible
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again. dense with everything that had happened
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in it, and I understood that this is available
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to me every single day, this re -seeing, that
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I do not have to fly to a brother city to earn
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it, that the home will become visible again any
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time I am willing to do the work of looking at
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it as though I had traveled a long way to. Arrive.
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This is, I have come to think, The entire secret
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hiding inside the much grander sounding business
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of staying awake, not some mystical sustained
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intensity, not a permanent heightened state that
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burns you out inside a week, but the small repeatable
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trick of looking at the over -familiar as if
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for the first time, on purpose, by choice, again
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and again, for the rest of your life. It is not
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glamorous. It is a discipline of the eyes, performed
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mostly in kitchens. But it is the whole difference
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between a life you inhabit and a life you sleep
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through, and it costs nothing but the willingness
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to keep doing the one thing the mind most wants
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to quit doing, which is to actually look at what
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is actually in front of it. Celonie felt it too,
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the homecoming, the changed self in the unchanged
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room, though she felt it her own way, which was
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through her hands and not her head. I watched
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her move through the flat, setting it back to
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rights, and I watched her drift, without quite
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deciding to, toward the workroom, the bare room,
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the emptied one, the scene of the fallow. Three
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days ago, she could barely look at it. It had
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been the visible shape of her hollowness, the
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cleared tables and accusation. Now she went in.
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I stood in the hall and watched. Not following,
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because some thresholds you let a person cross
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alone. She went in, and she stood in the middle
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of the bare room in the October light, and after
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a while she reached out and put her hand flat
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on a bolt of plain cloth that had been left on
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the shelf, undyed, unconsidered. a nothing length
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of base material, and she left her hand there,
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the way you put a hand on a sleeping animal to
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feel it breathe, and I saw her face do the thing
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it does at the very start of a making, months
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before there is anything to show, the inward
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narrowing, the listening there, make her beginning
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to hear what the cloth wants to become. The well
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had refilled. The tide had come all the way in.
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The fallow was over. Not because anyone declared
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it over, but because the ground had lain empty
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long enough and was ready, on its own schedule,
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to bear again. She did not cut anything. She
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did not even take the cloth down. She just stood
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with her hand on it. listening, and I left her
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to it, and went and put the kettle on, because
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the most useful thing I could do for the beginning
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of my wife's next collection was to make her
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a chai and not say one word about the look on
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her face. That evening we sat at our own table,
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in our own light gone to dusk, home, changed,
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and she wrapped her hands around the cup I brought
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her and said, It's strange. Everything's exactly
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the same, and it feels completely different.
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I know, I said. I've been thinking about it all
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day. The flat didn't change. We did. The sameness
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is just the thing we measure the change against.
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She looked at me over the cup, the small smile,
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the one that has my whole life folded into it.
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Listen to you. Two years ago, you came in off
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that balcony and couldn't manage a true sentence,
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and now you're sitting here being quietly profound
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about rivers. She reached across the worn table
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and put her hand on the back of mine, the old
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gesture, the small proprietary sentence. You
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came home awake. I was a little afraid you wouldn't,
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that the trip would wear off at the door, the
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way trips do. It's not going to wear off, I said.
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I decided, on the threshold, with the bag still
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in my hands. The trip was the rehearsal. This
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is the part that counts. Good, she said. Our
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word, the full container, handed back to me across
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the table the way I had handed it to her in the
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dark in the south. And we sat in our own dusk
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in our own unchanged rooms. Two changed people,
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the same light going down on entirely different
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faces, and I was, for one more ordinary evening,
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completely and deliberately at home in my own
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life. I wrote it in the fifth notebook before
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bed, in the lamplight, the flat quiet around
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us in the way only a home you have just come
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back to is quiet. Home. Mira booked the spring
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before we left. My brother said, don't be a stranger.
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The whole treaty in a worn out phrase. Saloni
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didn't sleep on the way back. The gathering stillness,
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the tide all the way in. I said nothing about
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the look. You can't put a bucket under a spring.
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And then the hardest part of any trip, coming
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home to the identical flat as a changed man.
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The river isn't the same twice, but the emphasis
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is wrong. It's not the river that changes, it's
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you, and an unchanged home is the purest measurement
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of it. The danger. The home eats the change.
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The awakeness spills on the threshold. You're
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nodding at your own table again by Tuesday. Named
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it. Refused it. Stood in my own kitchen and looked
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at it like a tourist who'd traveled a long way
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to see it, and it woke back up. The re -seeing
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is available every day. I don't have to fly anywhere
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to earn it. Saloni put her hand on a bolt of
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plain cloth and started to listen. The phallus
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over. I made chai and said nothing. And below
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it, the working line. You do not have to leave
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home to wake up. You only think you do. The trip
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is the rehearsal. The home is the performance.
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Bring the awakeness back through your own front
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door and keep it alive in the most familiar room
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you own. That is the whole discipline and almost
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no one manages it. And it is the only thing that
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turns a good trip into a changed life instead
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of a fond memory. Look at your own kitchen as
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though you traveled a long way to see it. You
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did. It just took you four days and a brother
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city to remember the distance. To be continued
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That was episode 37 of My Playful Wife. If this
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story is staying with you, the next episode is
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already waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss
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Links are in the description. Thank you for listening.