I Keep Editing Them In My Head

The call ended nineteen minutes ago and you have already run it three times.

Not the version that happened. The other one. The one where your father says the thing slightly differently, and you answer the way you thought of afterward, and the whole exchange resolves into something that leaves you standing about four inches taller.

You do it in the car. You do it in the shower. You have done it while somebody was actually talking to you.

And here is what nobody tells you about the rewrite. It is not harmless. Every pass through it makes the real conversation feel like a rough draft of a better one that exists somewhere, and you go into the next call already comparing.

What the editing is actually for

Let me be fair to the habit before taking it apart, because it did not come from nowhere.

The rewrite is a form of preparation. Somewhere back there, in a house where conversations went badly and went fast, a child worked out that if he could think of the right sentence in advance, the next one might go differently. That was intelligent. It was probably the most intelligent thing available at the time.

The trouble is that it kept running after it stopped working.

You have been running a survival skill thirty years past the emergency, and no habit built to protect a child has ever once been evidence of a fault in the adult. Ecclesiastes 7:10 tells a man not to say that the former days were better than these, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person set down a tool without contempt for the person who picked it up.

And there is a second thing the editing does, which is harder to admit. It gives you a version of your father you can actually have a relationship with.

The edited one listens. The edited one asks a follow up question. He is warm in the specific way you needed at fourteen, and he is available at any hour, and he never once says the thing that lands wrong.

You are permitted to want that, and wishing your own father were easier to talk to has never once been a failure of love. The Spirit of God is what makes an honest wish safe to look at, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 7 that a man is not to ask what has become of the former days, because that question is badly formed.

Say not thou

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this. (Ecclesiastes 7:10, King James Version)

That verse is usually pointed at nostalgia and it applies just as exactly to what you do.

Look at the reason the writer gives. Not that the former days were fine, and not that things are good now. He says the question is not asked wisely. It is a badly formed question, and a badly formed question cannot produce a usable answer no matter how long you sit with it.

Same with the rewrite. What if he had said it differently is a question with no answer available anywhere in the world, and you have been putting real hours into it.

You have been spending your evenings on a question that cannot be answered, and the exhaustion from it has never once meant you were failing to try hard enough. It is written in Ecclesiastes 7:10 that the question is not wisely asked at all, which is the written word calling the whole exercise off, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends a loop from the inside.

And your father is a real person while all this is happening. He has his own reasons for the way he talks, mostly handed to him by somebody, and he is right about at least one thing you have never conceded. The edited version in your head cannot be right about anything, because he only ever says what you write for him.

That is the cost, and it is enormous. You have made him unable to surprise you.

You are able to be surprised by somebody you have known for forty years, and God has never once finished writing a person while they are still alive. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a real person open rather than closed, and Ecclesiastes 7 warns plainly against a question that keeps a man facing backward.

The disappointment nobody can see

Here is the mechanism, laid out plainly, because seeing it is most of the work.

You talk to your father. It goes the way it goes, which is neither disastrous nor good, roughly a five out of ten. Then, within the hour, the edited version runs, and the edited version is a nine.

And your nervous system does not file those separately. It files a five and a nine about the same man on the same evening, and what it concludes is that something went wrong tonight.

Nothing went wrong. It was a five, the way it has been a five for years. The nine is the problem.

You have been grading a real evening against a script you wrote yourself, and no actual conversation on earth has ever once been able to win that. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a rigged comparison out of a man's hands, and it is written that the former days question is not wisely asked and never was.

Watch what this costs across a decade. Every real interaction is followed by a small private disappointment that your father never sees, never causes, and cannot fix. From his side, the calls are fine. From your side, every one of them is a near miss.

And the gap between those two experiences is entirely manufactured, in a car, on the way home, by you.

You are able to end a phone call and let it be exactly what it was, and an ordinary conversation with your own father has never once needed improving to be worth having. The Spirit of God is what makes a five out of ten sufficient rather than a defeat, and Ecclesiastes 7:10 puts the whole backward looking question out of bounds.