The Tidewalker

You feel the emotional weather before it arrives. You know from the sound of a key in the lock what kind of evening it will be; you sense which child is about to come apart, which friend is not actually fine. And you do not merely notice — you move. You are the one who arrives with the food, who books the appointment, who intervenes before anyone has asked for help.

People love you for protection of a kind most adults stopped receiving long ago. Being cared for by you is a physical experience.

The price is that you are not on the list. Care flows outward from you in a single direction, and has done for so long that being cared for now feels almost unbearable — clumsy, exposing, easier to deflect. So you give, and something in you keeps an account nobody knows exists, and when the account is not honoured you do not confront it. You go quiet and you resent silently, and then you are ashamed of the resentment. The resentment is not ugliness in you. It is the only language the unasked question has left.