What comes next
FARAH He doesn’t answer immediately. I stand in front of his desk and I hold his gaze and I let the silence be what it is, which is enormous and necessary and doing its own work. I have learned not to fill his silences — learned it slowly and at some cost, because silence used to feel like losing ground and now it feels like something else entirely. Like patience. Like trust in the process of a thing arriving in its own time. He stands up. He doesn’t come around the desk — he goes to the window, which is what he does when something requires space and he requires the looking-out-at-something-else that lets him say the true thing sideways. I stay where I am. I give him the window. “What exactly did you hear,” he says. His voice is careful and even and giving away nothing, which tells me
- Writer
