Maya and I got into a stupid argument last spring about something I can’t even fully reconstruct now. Plans that changed, a miscommunication, one of us felt dismissed and the other felt blamed. It lasted about four days, which is longer than it deserved.
What ended it was her texting me a photo of a dog she’d seen on her walk with no caption, just the photo. I texted back “very good dog.” That was it. We got coffee the next day and didn’t discuss the argument at all, which I’d have found unsatisfying a few years ago. Now I think some things resolve better by just being quietly set down than by being talked all the way through.
Not every rupture needs a full post-mortem. Sometimes a photo of a dog is its own kind of apology, and that’s enough.