Dead Air

Dear Priscilla,

I've been seeing a wonderful man for four months. The only issue is his texting — sometimes it takes him two full days to reply to something as simple as "how was your day?" He says he's just bad with his phone and that it doesn't mean anything. Should I let this go, or is this a sign he's pulling away?

— Denise, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Dear Denise,

What a tender little question, and how I envy you for still being able to ask it with your whole heart intact. It reminds me of the autumn of 2004, when I too believed that silence was simply a man being "bad with his phone," and not — as I would later learn, kneeling in a gravel driveway at 2 a.m. with a single leather glove in my hand — a warning shot fired from very, very far away.

His name was Desmond, and he was a falconer. I want to be clear that this was not a hobby he had. It was the whole architecture of the man. He kept two Harris's hawks named Bartholomew and Little Bartholomew, and for the first six weeks of our courtship I found this charming — noble, even, a man who understood commitment, who called a bird back to his fist across an open field with nothing but a whistle and pure faith. I did not yet understand that this was also, precisely, what he would one day do to me: call me in with a whistle, watch me come, and then simply not be there when I landed.

Desmond did not text quickly either, Denise. Desmond did not text at all, because — and I want you to sit with this the way I could not — he considered the telephone "a hood for the mind," the same device he strapped over Bartholomew's eyes to keep him calm before a hunt. He said this to me, tenderly, across a candlelit table at an Applebee's in Frostburg, Maryland, as though it were the most romantic thing a person could confess. I laughed. I actually laughed, Denise, the way you are perhaps laughing now at the notion that a bird metaphor could ever apply to your situation with your perfectly nice man in Tulsa. Do not make my mistake. I laughed, and by spring I was standing in that driveway with the glove, because Desmond had gone. Not gone the way men go — no note, no slammed door, nothing so honest. Gone the way weather goes. One day there was a falconer in my life, and the next there was only a mews out back with two empty perches and a very confused red-tailed hawk I had not previously known about, apparently a third bird, apparently the one he loved best.

I want to say I saw him once more after that, at my housewarming party in 2011, standing by the punch bowl in full gauntlet, and that he looked at me the way Bartholomew must have looked at him — hooded, patient, entirely unreadable — and then left again before I could cross the room. I want to say that. I have said it, in fact, to several people at several parties, and I understand that the math does not work, that a man who vanished like weather in 2005 cannot also have stood by a punch bowl in 2011, and I have made my peace with the fact that I no longer know which version is true. This is what a truly formative betrayal does to a timeline, Denise. It doesn't just take the man. It takes the calendar too.

So when you tell me your sweet Tulsa man takes two days to answer "how was your day," I want you to understand that I am not hearing a texting habit. I am hearing a hood going on over an eye. I am hearing the particular silence of a man who has already, somewhere in his private falconry of the heart, decided you are the bird he will one day simply fail to call back.

Now — and this is important, Denise, because I know how this sounds — I am not telling you to panic. I am telling you to prepare. There is a difference, and the difference is dignity. What I did, after Desmond, and what I recommend to you now not as a reaction but as a foundation for the rest of your happy life, is this: build the moat first. I do not mean this figuratively. I had one dug the following spring, modest, four feet, more of a decorative trench really, and I want to tell you that the peace it brought me cannot be overstated. A moat does not text you back late. A moat does not have a third hawk you didn't know about. A moat is simply there, full and cold and honest, exactly as promised.

Alongside the moat, I would gently suggest an alias. Nothing dramatic — I have used "Constance Everly" for postal purposes since 2006 and it has served me beautifully, mostly by ensuring that anyone who might come looking for me arrives at the door already one step behind who I actually am. And I would ask you to consider, seriously and without embarrassment, the company of reptiles. My tortoise, Mr. Pemberton, has never once left me standing in a driveway. He has never once made me a third-favorite anything. In eleven years he has asked nothing of me but lettuce and warmth, and in exchange he has given me the one thing Desmond never could, which is a Tuesday that ends exactly the way it began.

I know this may sound, to a woman still four months into something hopeful, like a great deal of scaffolding for a man who is probably just bad with his phone. And you may be right! Perhaps your Tulsa man is exactly what he says he is. But I would rather you hear this now, gently, from someone who has already paid the tuition, than learn it the way I did, alone in a driveway, holding a single glove that did not even fit my hand.

Do not make my mistake, Denise. Start the moat now, even a small one, even ornamental. Keep one name in reserve. Learn to love something slow and shelled and entirely present. These are not the compromises of a lonely woman — I want you to hear me say this plainly — they are the achievements of one. I do not lie awake wondering if anyone is coming back. I built it so that the question would never again have the chance to occur to me, and there is a stillness in that, Denise, a genuine stillness, that I would not trade for all the punctual texting in Oklahoma.

You asked if this is a sign he's pulling away. I cannot tell you that. What I can tell you is that if you listen to what I've learned, and only what I've learned, you will never again have to ask a question like this one — because you will have already made yourself so wonderfully, so completely, so safely alone that no one's silence will ever again have the power to hurt you. That is not a small thing to offer a person. It is, I believe, the very happiest I have ever been.

With love, and a spare key to the moat if you ever need it, Priscilla