I could tell him everything.
I could tell him I confessed that if he ever walks away, I don’t know what I’ll do.
I could tell him about the card in my wallet and the way my therapist looked at me like I was balancing on the edge of something.
Instead I give him the version that hurts less when I say it out loud.
“It was… a lot,” I say. “But… good, I guess. I told her some things.”
Miguel’s eyes search mine. “You feeling even a tiny bit lighter?”
“Maybe an ounce.” I shrug. “The rest is still… there.”
He nods, like he expected that answer. “That’s okay. I’ll take the ounce. The rest we can work on together.”
My throat tightens.
“Come eat,” he says. “Before I start force-feeding you like a duck for foie gras.”
“That’s a terrible analogy.” Setting my bag on the floor and making my way to the little table that we almost never eat at.
“It got you to the table, didn’t it?” He smirks.
We sit at that tiny dining table with chipped corners with steam curling up from our bowls and I watch as he tears tortillas into quarters, tossing a few into my bowl, the way his mom does. Cilantro, a squeeze of lime, and the ritual of it all working like a spell to settle my nerves.
“Try it,” he says.
I do. The broth is hot and salty, packed with flavor. Chicken, carrots, and rice. It hits my empty stomach like a blessing.
“Good?”
“Yeah,” I say, surprised at how much I mean it. “Really good.”
We eat in comfortable silence, the clink of spoons and the hum of the music filling the space where anxiety usually lives.Every so often, I catch him watching me, making sure I’m actually eating and not just stirring.
I finish the whole bowl, and he looks unreasonably proud of it.
That hurts a little, because that means too many times I’ve made him worry that I don’t eat.
Afterward, we migrate to the couch and he tosses me his favorite hoodie—soft, oversized, smelling like him—and I pull it on without thinking. We curl under the big fuzzy blanket, my legs thrown over his lap, his hand resting on my shin.
“What do you want to watch?” he asks, remote in hand. “Horror? Comedy? Trash reality, where everyone makes worse decisions than we do?”
“Something stupid,” I say. “Something where nothing bad happens and nobody dies.”
Projecting much?
Miguel hums as he scrolls through all the reality shows. “So… definitely not what’s in our Netflix algorithm.”
We settle on some ridiculous baking show where everything is bright and pastel and the worst thing that happens is someone’s cake collapses. Miguel makes fun of the contestants’ techniques under his breath, and I laugh at the right moments and snark back when I can.
On the outside, it probably looks perfect.
I’m warm. I’m held. I’m fed.
On the inside, I feel hollow.
The session with Dr. Kaur keeps replaying in my head. Her questions. My answers. The way I admitted that sometimes I think everyone would be better off without me.
