The Polite Reply

On the absurd theatre of avoidance

Every theatre of avoidance ends the same: a closed door, an echo, no audience.

A story takes shape in fragments. Scenes arrive at random, then fall into place like props on a stage, revealing a play I didn’t know I was writing. What unfolds is not romance but theatre: the kind where one actor speaks in lines of truth, and the other replies with padding.

A woman sealed a letter with a single line: “I have found myself and peace again.”
It wasn’t a report. It was a door closing. She stared at the screen and pressed send.

The man on the other side of the world read it and felt the air change. There was nothing to argue with, no list, no accusation, no staircase to descend together. Just a wall where a hallway used to be. That was not what he expected.

He reached for what he always reached for when truth arrived uninvited: padding.
“I’m very glad to hear that,” he wrote back.

The sentence did what such sentences do. It sounded kind without touching anything. It turned a verdict into “good news,” a boundary into a wellness update. It tried to shrink a moral event into something he could stand beside and nod at.

But the sentence had a problem. It showed discomfort; it was not a statement. It was a glove without a hand.

The woman didn’t reply. Silence kept the shape of what had happened, for days, weeks, months.

Later, when he remembered the exchange, the man could not recall what he was “glad” about. He only remembered the relief of typing a polite phrase and the dull ache that followed…like hanging a curtain over a locked window, as if that could change what’s behind it.

That is how avoidance speaks: not to what is said, but to the feeling of not knowing what to say. It borrows the tone of care to escape the cost of truth. And it always sounds reasonable, until there is nothing on the other side of it. Just a closed door and the echo of one’s own words.