I am steady for the people who count on me

I am with them and I am actually here. Not half here, not finishing something else in my head while my face does the listening. Present, in the room, for whatever this ordinary hour turns out to hold. This is the thing I want to be good at more than anything else I am currently good at, and it is the only one nobody will ever write down anywhere or give me credit for.

There is a conversation happening at knee height and I have crouched down to be in it. Something is being explained to me in enormous detail, none of it is urgent, and I am not hurrying it along or steering it toward a finish. There is nowhere else this hour is supposed to be going. I have stopped checking how long it has been.

There have been stretches where I was in the room and somewhere else at the same time, and I think that was felt even if it was never said out loud. Attention is not invisible. People can always tell, and they generally decide something about themselves rather than something about you, which is the part that ought to stop me cold. Somebody who is half listened to does not conclude that you are busy. They conclude that they are boring. I do not want to be somebody who was technically present for this. They will not remember that I was busy. They will remember whether or not I looked up.

What I can offer is not endless patience, because nobody has that and pretending otherwise only makes me worse at it when it runs out. It is attention, in specific bounded amounts, given completely. Ten real minutes is worth more than a whole evening of being nearby, and the reason is simple enough. Nobody remembers proximity. They remember having been the only thing in the room. Quality of attention beats quantity of hours, which is genuinely good news, because hours are the thing I do not have. Ten minutes in which nothing else exists is a different substance entirely from an evening spent within earshot.

So today the phone goes in another room for the first ten minutes we are together. Not the whole evening, and not a rule so ambitious that I will have broken it by Thursday and quietly abandoned the entire idea by the weekend. Ten minutes, with nothing competing for me. Bounded and real beats unlimited and theoretical every single time, and I would rather promise a little and actually deliver it.

This is the part they will remember, and it is made out of ordinary hours exactly like this one. Not the holidays. This. I am here for it.