Every Friday night she drives down and you cook dinner.
You learn her preferences the way you learn anything worth knowing, by paying attention. She doesn't like cilantro. She prefers her wine poured before she sits. She likes the kitchen warm. You note these things and act on them without being asked, which is its own kind of language, the one you've always spoken.
She sits at the table and tells you about her week. The difficult colleague. The meeting that ran long. The small injustice at the grocery store on Wednesday that she is still, four days later, refining into a better story. You listen. You ask questions. You pour more wine.
The pasta arrives on her plate and she picks up her fork.
You are not sure, exactly, when you started noticing the silence where the thank you would go. You only know that you notice it now, the way you notice a step that isn't there when you're walking down stairs in the dark. A small lurch. A recalibration. You set your own plate down and she is already halfway through a story about Thursday, the one where her coworker took credit for her idea, and you are glad she is comfortable; you tell yourself. You are glad she feels at home.
At some point in the evening, you will mention something, a thing that happened to you, a thought you've been carrying around all week like a stone in your pocket, and she will nod, and the conversation will move on, and you will understand that the question isn't coming. Not tonight. It rarely comes. You have stopped waiting for it the way you stop waiting for a bus after a while and simply start walking.
This is not cruelty. You want to be clear about that. This is something quieter and harder to name. She sets her glass down. “That's the whole thing,” she says, finishing the story, talking to her plate. You refill her wine.
You clear the plates. She thanks you for a lovely evening when she leaves. Not for the cooking, specifically. For the evening, generally. You stand in the kitchen afterward and the refrigerator hums and you think about all the small specific things that go unnamed.
Dear Aliens,
We are sending you this document because you asked for one, and we are a species that, when asked, tries to provide.
We want you to know that we cook for each other. We drive distances on Friday nights. We pour the wine before the person sits down because we have been paying attention. We do these things without being asked, and sometimes without being thanked, and we do them again the following Friday.
We are not sure what this says about us. Possibly that we are foolish. Possibly that we believe, despite everything, that the next dinner will be different.
If your kind bonds for life with complete mutual absorption, if the idea of sitting across from someone who does not ask about your week is as strange to you as faster-than-light travel is to us, then we hope this document helps. We are trying to explain something that we cannot entirely explain to ourselves.
If your kind has no concept of personal relationships at all, then we understand this document may be confusing.
Either way: the cilantro thing is non-negotiable. Some of us just don't like it.
We hope you will understand. We hope you will come in peace.
We are doing our best.