They weren’t collaborating with the man but with one another in the currency of the soul

More about They weren’t collaborating with the man but with one another in the currency of the soul

They sat as if the day had asked them to wait
and forgotten to return.
No table. No papers.
Just knees, boots, coats,
and the shared weight of having stayed.

The man was somewhere else.
He always is.
A name, a rule, a voice that claims authorship.
They did not speak of him.
They had already passed that stage.

What moved between them was quieter.
A reckoning without arithmetic.
A trade not measured in hours or wages,
but in attention, in endurance,
in the willingness to remain present
after certainty had gone.

One leaned forward and learned restraint.
Another leaned back and learned patience.
Someone held silence the way others hold tools.
Someone else let a sentence die
so another might breathe.

No one corrected anyone.
That was the first agreement.
Not spoken.
Recognized.

Their work did not sit in front of them.
It sat among them—
a low fire with no visible flame,
asking not for brilliance
but for staying.

They lost things here.
Edges.
Illusions of singular voice.
The comfort of being finished.

What they gained was less portable.
A shared rhythm.
A knowledge of when to stop.
A trust that did not require explanation.

If you asked who made the work,
they would look at one another
and not answer.
Not out of secrecy,
but accuracy.

The man would take credit later.
Men always do.

What remained with them
was different:
the memory of having been altered
without being owned,
of having worked together
not in obedience,
not in protest,
but in a quiet, stubborn exchange
that spent the only currency that mattered
and left them poorer in names
and richer in having been changed.