Starting again while the old hope is in your hand

A new person is interested, and you are honoured and absent in the same hour. You check the old thread before you answer the new one. You call this caution. Some of it is caution. Some of it is a divided heart pretending to be wise. You are allowed to be not ready. The costly move is to start, keep one foot in the old doorway, and then blame the new person for feeling the draft.

Count, honestly, how often you still look for him. If it is daily, you are not between stories. You are in the first one, with a guest. A guest deserves to know the room is occupied, or you wait until it is not. If the looking has thinned to something you can put down during a real plan, the question changes. It is no longer whether you are allowed to begin. It is whether you will put the phone face-down while you are there. People call this having a foot in both camps. Camps are a war word. Love uses it anyway, because the body knows when it is split.

What the new person can feel

They may not know his name. They can feel the half-second delay, the laugh that arrives late, the way your eyes check a lit screen. Yeats asked the beloved to tread softly, because he had spread his dreams under their feet. If you start again while the old hope is still in your hand, you are asking someone to tread softly on a dream that is not about them. That is a heavy thing to hand a near-stranger. Kindness here is not a speech about your past on the first coffee. Kindness is not offering a beginning you cannot inhabit.

Daily, or weekly

Daily checking means the story is current. Weekly, and fading, can mean you are in the weather after a storm, still wet, able to walk. Be strict with yourself for one week and write the number down. The number is less romantic than your explanation, which is why it helps. Explanations are clever. A tally is not.

I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W. B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

The poem is tender, and it is also a warning about weight. Do not make the new person responsible for a dream you have not put down. Tread softly is a beautiful request when both people are in the same story. It is unfair when one of them is standing in for someone else.

A cleaner choice than a half-meeting

• If you look for him every day, wait. Tell the new person you are not free, in one sentence, if they ask for more than friendliness.
• If the looking is occasional and the new plan is real, put the phone away for the length of the plan.
• Do not use the new person as proof that you are healed. Healing is quieter than that.
• Do not punish them for not being him, and do not punish him by displaying them.

Which story this month

Say this plainly in a session if you cannot say it plainly to yourself. Which story are you in? You can love the past and still tell the truth about the present. The person who might stay will not compete well with a ghost you refresh. Close the refresh, or wait. Both are cleaner than a half-meeting.