Chapter Nineteen — — Omar, Again

Chapter Nineteen

Omar, Again

He called Omar that afternoon. Not to report a decision — no decision had been made. He called the way you call the person who knows the full context of your interior, whose voice is a form of familiar ground.

Omar answered on the second ring.

"Are you free?" Zakariya said.

"For you, yes. What is it?"

"I have been thinking. The whole of it, from the beginning."

"And?"

He told him. Not with philosophical apparatus but in the simpler language of two people who know each other's context. He told him about the pattern — the control and the management and the exits from the middle and the shame that had called itself preparation. He told him what he had wanted to say to each of them.

Omar listened with the full resource of his attention. When Zakariya finished, Omar was quiet long enough that the quiet had weight. Then he said:

"You already know what I am going to say."

"Yes."

"Then why are you calling?"

Zakariya thought about this. "Because knowing it alone and knowing it with someone else is not the same thing. The alone knowing is mine. The known-with-someone knowing is real."

"Yes," Omar said. Just that.

They talked for another hour about other things — Omar's work, a book, a film they disagreed about. The ordinary conversation of the genuinely close, which moves between the significant and the unremarkable with the ease of people who do not need to protect the significant from the ordinary.

When Zakariya hung up he felt the specific quality of having been received — of having said the true thing to the right person and had it met. This was different from resolution. It was better than resolution.

Perhaps this is what friendship at its deepest is: the place where the true thing can be said and met. Not agreed with necessarily, not solved, not made comfortable. Simply met — received with the full attention of someone who knows you well enough to understand what is being said beneath the words, and who offers, in the meeting, the proof that the saying was worth the saying.