▸ Column · Feudal warlord-era court; the answerer as a cold, empire-building blademaster reading a courtship letter
SHREDDER replies.
The letter
For eight turnings of the moon a man named Marcus has sent word to me each dawn and come to my house every seventh night. He met my sister at her birthday feast in the cold season — yet when she asked him outright whether he had claimed me, he laughed and said we were "merely passing the season together," then took my hand and held it the rest of the night as though he had said nothing. He has never once named me before others as his. And still, when I lay fevered after the tooth-drawer's blade, he abandoned a journey his lord had ordered to sit at my side. When I once pressed him on what we were, he said he "puts no faith in titles," then spent an age recounting a couple who hurried and ruined all — which I have chosen to take as a warning offered for my good rather than a wall built against me, though in truth I can no longer tell. Is he guarding something real and slow to grow, or am I the warmth that spares him the trouble of seeking another woman through the matchmaker?
Shredder replies
You already hold the answer. He gave it to you across a feast table: "merely passing the season." Everything since — the held hand, the abandoned journey — is the comfort you have agreed to accept in place of the truth, and you call the trade "interpretation." Spare me. You did not write to me confused. You wrote to me hoping I would help you keep not-knowing a little longer, because not-knowing costs nothing and the alternative demands something of you.
Hear the mechanism. You are waiting for him to hand you a title, as though the word were his to grant and your dignity his to issue. It is not. The wall is not Marcus. The wall is a will that has learned to negotiate with itself and name the negotiation "patience."
So: state once, plainly, what you require. Not a plea — a term. Then do the hard thing the soft cannot: when his answer comes, believe it the first time, and act on it without narrating another eight months of reasons. If he will not meet you, walk, and pour the whole of that fire into a life so undeniable that "merely passing the season" becomes a footnote in a story he is no longer in.
I chose certainty. It left me a fortress and no one in it. Even so — I would not trade it for the comfort of a question I refused to ask.
— Shredder
Splinter weighs in
He tells you to issue a term and march off as mastery. He would. He answered every ambiguity of his life with iron, and I have watched, across many years, what that iron built — a man alone in a tower, mistaking the cold for clarity.
You are not weak, my child. Your confusion is a sentry, and it guards something tender: the fear that you mattered to him less than he mattered to you. Sit with that before you demand anything of anyone. You need not conquer Marcus. You need only stop abandoning your own knowing. The held hand was kindness; "passing the season" was the truth. You already grieve it. Let the grief speak — it will tell you, gently, when to go. That is not surrender. That is refusing to make a war out of a goodbye.
— Splinter
▸ Read next