“Julian.”
“Yes.”
“Take a breath.”
I took a breath.
“You’re not going to die from this conversation.”
“I know.”
“Your body doesn’t. Your body has spent years treating a conversation like this one as a thing that could kill you. We’re going to teach it something different, and that takes time. So when I tell you to take a breath, take it. Your body needs the practice.”
I took another.
“Better,” he said. He looked at me a while. “You said something a minute ago.Love did that.I want to come back to it. Not today. Today we just sat. But I want you to know that’s the work. That sentence, and everything you’ve built around it, and what it’s cost you. You ready for that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the right answer.”
The light in the room had moved while I talked. The clock said 3:17.
“I'd like to see you twice a week to start if you are able. Then we can cut back to weekly.”
“I don't think that's necessary?—”
“Julian.” He looked at me directly. “You've been carrying eighteen years of unprocessed grief. It's going to take more than one session to work through it.”
“Same time next week?”
“Okay.”
I wentevery week and stopped sitting in the parking lot. I didn’t tell anyone. Zion would have been unbearable. Simone would have cried. Tre would have found a way to make a joke about it.
And every week I didn’t call her. Wanting to didn’t ease; if anything it got worse as my mind got clearer, because the clearer I got the more I understood what I’d let walk out of my door that day. But I held the line. Three weeks of running alone in the mornings. Three weeks of a bed that had learned the shape of two people. I missed her in a way that had stopped being manageable, and I did not reach, because I refused to walk up to her as a half-built thing asking to be loved the rest of the way into shape.
“You look different,”Dr. Matthews said at my third session. “Less braced.”
“I slept through the night.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” he said. “Today, I want to go back to your father. The letter. Can you recall what it said?”
I could still see his handwriting. “That we’d be better off without him. That he’d only drag us down. That he loved us too much to let us watch what he was turning into.”
“What did you think about that back then?”
“I thought about it as weakness. As failure. As what happens when you let emotions take over instead of keeping your shit together.”
Dr. Matthews nodded slowly. “So strength, in your mind, means not feeling things.”
“Means feeling them but not letting them control you. Don't let feelings make you useless to the people who need you.”
“When you say useless...”
“I mean like my father. Unable to function. Unable to take care of anyone, even himself.”
“So your value comes from your ability to take care of others.” The way he said it made it sound wrong somehow.
