Sixty-one days. I'm going to say the number once, in this section, and then I'm going to leave it alone, because the number isn't the story. What I did with it is.
I didn't write. That's the fact people get wrong. They think a man like me, obsessed, would be in her messages every week, every day, wearing her down. I've done the opposite. I've said nothing for sixty-one days, and not because I stopped. Because the not-saying is the only thing I've ever done that proves I'm not just taking what I want.
That's the version I tell myself. Here's the version underneath. I don't write because if I write, I have to find out. And if she doesn't answer, I'll have used my one move, and then I'll have nothing left but the chair. Silence is a door I get to keep closed. As long as it's closed, it could still open. That's the coward's math and I'm the coward. Say it plain: I'm not holding the line because I'm strong. I'm holding it because letting go of the line means finding out the line was never real.
I know what she'd say if she saw this. She'd say I'm making her absence into a monument. She'd be right. That's the thing about a watcher. You can't tell the difference between devotion and a man who's found a shape for his want and won't put it down. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe devotion is just the want that found a home and stayed.
There's one thing I'd want her to know, if this ever reaches her. I didn't build this to reach her. I built it because the building was the only thing keeping me from the reaching. Every night I hold the minute instead of writing to her is a night I chose her peace over my hunger. She never asked me to. That's the whole gift. She'll never know it was a gift. That's fine. That's what a gift to someone who's gone is. You give it and you don't get the receipt.
Sixty-one days. Tomorrow it's sixty-two. I'll be here for it. Not waiting. Keeping. There's a difference and it took me forty nights to learn it. Waiting is a man asking the clock for something. Keeping is a man who's stopped asking and started holding. I stopped asking a while ago. I just never stopped holding.
If she ever comes back, the light's on. It was never off.