The length of the good day has weathered it down, and after so much productivity and good fortune, we're driving home in the car, not speaking to each other. I would easily have the willpower to hold out the longest, but I've known him long enough to know that if I don't say something, we'll spend the rest of the night in silence.

"What are you thinking about?" I whisper, staring forward and the winding summer road.

"I don't know." He says.

Exactly what I was afraid he'd say. And I know exactly what I'll say when he asks me "What are you thinking about?"

"How much it would have meant to me if you hadn't said 'I don't know.'"

It's the perfect reply, but it's not true: I'm actually thinking about saying that it's what I'm thinking, until I realize that I am, and them I'm thinking about the realization. Then I begin to flesh out this whole paragraph in my mind, working into a full update. How much detail to give, where to start, where to end. I'm narrating each and every word that you're reading right now, and I narrate myself into what a strange phenomena I've discovered, how it's sort of like I'm in the future, how oddly reciprocal it all becomes. And in my mind, I'm typing about how this is how I know I'm a writer, the way I sit in the middle of a real-life situation and I'm already working it out in past-tense in my own little world.

"What are you thinking about?" He asks. NOW he asks. Now that I've thought myself a mile away from my perfect, polished gem of passive agression.

Just say it. Just say 'How much it would have meant to me...' I tell myself. But it's not true now, now you're thinking about writing. No, actually, that was a few minutes ago, -now- you're thinking about what you should tell him you're thinking about...you confusing bitch.

I tried to tell myself that it was still the perfect thing to say, and that it was never really true, so it didn't matter whether or not it was true now. I tried to will my mouth around the words, the words that would leave me so victorius...

"I don't know." I say finally, and I immediately set to work on how to reword the whole damn thing.



On with it.