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Chinese has one word for the thing that brings two people together, and a different word for whether they get to stay.
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Put together they make yuanfen. Yuan is the affinity, the pull, the reason the two of you were in the same room. Fen is the portion, the share, how much of a future was allotted.
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They are two separate accounts, and nobody told you that at the kitchen table.
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The Size of the Meeting Was Never a Promise About the Ending.
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There is a four character phrase for exactly the thing you have been living in. You yuan wu fen. To have the meeting and not the share.
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In China it is what people say out loud when they are ending something they did not want to end, and it is understood as kind.
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That is the part worth standing still for. It is not used to mean the connection was imagined. It is used to mean the connection was there, and the portion ran out anyway.
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It is eleven at night in an American kitchen and the argument in her head has run the same lap since spring. If it was that strong, it was supposed to work.
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That sentence is doing all the damage, and it is built on one assumption nobody checks. It assumes the two columns are the same column.
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Yuan is everything you have been using as evidence, and the list is not short:
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The first six weeks, when neither of you slept much. |
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The thing he said in the car that nobody else would have said. |
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The two of you being in the same place on the one night you both went. |
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How fast it got past small talk. |
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The way his name still does something to your hands. |
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The fact that it has been months and it has not faded. |
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All of that is in the first column and the first column is full. Nobody is arguing with you about it. The second column is a different question, and it was never going to be answered by the first one.
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Chinese kept a second phrase for when both columns fill. You yuan you fen. It exists because the other outcome is common enough to need its own name.
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You were not wrong about the pull. You were not making it up. You were reading one column and filing it as a verdict on both.
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And if he comes back inside the next month, which plenty of them will, the first column will light up again on sight. It will not tell you one thing about the second. For that you need him to say what he did with the months, out loud, before anything starts.
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The share was never his to hand you either, and the one account you can add to this week is your own.
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Also True
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What They Found
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Researchers in Seattle put newlyweds in an apartment with cameras and watched them do nothing in particular for a day. They counted bids, the small reaches: a comment about a boat going past, a hand on a shoulder. Six years later, the couples still together had turned toward those bids about eighty six percent of the time. The ones who had divorced, about thirty three. The authors noted the study was observational, so it shows the split and not the cause.
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The Mirror
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What did he do in the last six months that would go in the second column?
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Today’s Devotion: Tonight, pick up one thing he gave you and say out loud which column it belongs in. Put it back where it was and turn off the kitchen light.
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Keep your power in your own hands.
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Sofia
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