Théo
The calm one. I write that like it's just a fact about him and not the thing that has kept me tethered to the earth since 2019.
How we met
A print fair in a church basement in Pilsen, the January it wouldn't stop snowing. Théo had driven down from Montréal with a suitcase of riso prints and a little space heater he refused to share. I came back to his table three times before I bought anything. The third time he said, "You keep looking at the same one," which was true, and I said I couldn't afford it, which was also true, and he wrote his number on the back and let me have it for nothing.
I still have the print. I moved countries with the man before I got around to framing it, which tells you everything about my relationship to finishing things.
He's from Montréal, he prints in two colours because the third always costs too much, and he says soft, not hard, when he means a decision doesn't have to be made today.
What he does for the game
Théo does the art for Saltwater Almanac. Everything you see in Wren's world — the grey water, the lamp, the pages — comes through his hands and his two-colour brain first.
His test pulls for the game. Oxblood over a blue that's almost not there. He says the misregistration is the point: "that's where it breathes."
He gets the thing I could never explain to a client — that a slightly wrong colour, laid over another, makes a third colour that feels remembered rather than seen. That's the whole mood of The Almanac Mechanic: you're not reading a clean record, you're reading through the smudge. He understood that before I had words for it.
The line I keep. Middle of an ordinary Tuesday, me spiralling about whether I have any business making a game at all, and he said, not even looking up from the press:
"You've been making this game since you were seven, you just didn't have Unity."
I think about that sentence more than he knows. He handed me my whole life back and filed it under to-do.
Small weather
We live in Graça with a cat named Pierogi, who Théo swears he didn't want and now carries around like an infant.
The cat we did not need, on the man who did not want him.
Domestic facts, so I don't lose them when I'm old: he makes the coffee and brings it before I ask. He knows the difference between my good quiet and my bad quiet and only asks about the bad one. He reads the last page of every book first and I've stopped being appalled. He'll let me talk out a mechanic at 1am and then remember it better than I do in the morning.
This is what I mean by Attention as love. He doesn't perform caring about me. He just knows where I keep the sharp edges, and moves them before I walk into them.
What I keep forgetting to say
That the calm isn't free. That it costs him something to be the steady one while I'm the weather. He'd wave it off if I said it, so I don't say it, which is exactly the wrong reason. Say it anyway. Out loud. Soon.