▸ Column · Modern-day New York City — the world above Leo's tunnels, where people carry ordinary griefs his world has no room to name
LEONARDO replies.
The letter
My partner hasn't given me anything concrete — no messages I've seen, no unexplained absences, nothing I could hold in my hands and call proof. But for about three months something has felt wrong: he smiles at his phone a beat too long, started putting on cologne for routine errands, and when he holds me it feels like an apology he can't quite say out loud. I haven't gone looking because looking feels like it would say something terrible about me — and honestly, I'm afraid of what it would mean about me if I searched and found nothing. My sister thinks I'm reading disaster into silence because my last relationship ended badly and I never really stopped expecting it to happen again. She might be right. But the feeling sits in me like something heavy every morning, and I can't figure out whether to trust it or treat it as wreckage left over from before.
Leonardo replies
The stone in your chest is not evidence. But it is not nothing, either, and collapsing those two into one sentence is what is making this unbearable.
Fear of losing someone — especially someone you have already lost once — fills the space where actual information would go. Your gut right now may not be reading your partner at all. It may be reading your last relationship, which ended in ways that left a mark you have not finished mapping. Your sister is not entirely wrong. She is also not entirely right. Both of those are allowed to be true at the same time.
What I would not do is check. Not because checking is disloyal in itself — but because checking without speaking first is fear wearing the uniform of vigilance. My sensei told me once that the most dangerous thing a leader does is mistake his own dread for intelligence. I have done that. I watched real distance grow while I was busy acting on a ghost no one else could see.
The disciplined move, and the one that costs the most, is to name the stone to him directly. Not as an accusation. As a real thing, said plainly: "I have been carrying something heavy for months, and I need to know if it is mine to carry alone." That is not asking whether he is lying. It is asking him to be present for something you are actually living. You have been dreading the conversation instead of having it, and the dread is the only thing so far that has actually cost you anything.
— Leonardo
Shredder weighs in
How tender. Leonardo has given you a more elegant way to narrate the same indecision. The stone in your chest is not inherited grief from the last marriage. It is the accumulated weight of a question you have refused to answer for three months, dressed in the language of loyalty. Stop living in the suspension. Ask him directly — once, without ceremony, without the speech about what you are "carrying." The asking costs almost nothing. I know something about what remains when you choose the certainty of empire over the people inside your walls. The silence is what costs everything. End it.
— Shredder
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