a year is a long time to sit in the same chair every week and still leave the room a stranger.

he told me, kindly, that he didn’t think this was working between us. that we hadn’t built the thing it needs to work. and i said something reasonable back, something adult, because that is what i do, and then i went home and felt it land somewhere much deeper than it had any right to land.

that is the part i keep turning over. i have always described this as a service. a thing you go to for the parts of your life you can’t manage alone, the way you’d call someone about a leak you don’t know how to fix. i said that out loud, more than once, with a straight face. so it should not have felt like being left. it should have felt like a contract ending.

it did not feel like a contract ending. it felt worse than most of the actual leavings.

and here is the ugly arithmetic underneath it. he said the word trust and i understood immediately what he meant, because he was right, and because i had told him at the very start that i lie. i told him plainly. i said you will have to ask me things, you will have to push, you will have to not take the first answer. i handed him the instruction manual and then spent a year quietly noting that he wasn’t using it, as if that were evidence of something. as if a man not reaching into a locked room proves the room isn’t mine.

there is a thing i have never said in that room. i have never said it in most rooms. i did something stranger than hiding it: i built a finished story around it, one where i had already dealt with it, already sat with someone about it, already been given a name for it and moved on. i have told that version to people who love me. i don’t remember deciding to. i only know that it exists, and that it is smooth and complete in a way the truth is not, and that it has been doing its job for years.

so when he said we hadn’t built trust, what i felt was not disagreement. it was recognition, arriving very fast, from a long way off.

in session notes #1 i wrote that i wasn’t working on it, i was only getting better at describing it. i thought that was a clever line at the time. it turns out it was a diagnosis, and i wrote it down myself, and then i went right on doing exactly that for another few months.

the defeat isn’t that it didn’t work. it’s that i am someone who talks constantly about becoming better and has become mostly more articulate. those are not the same thing. articulate is what you get when you learn the vocabulary and skip the surgery.

i could start again. there is a version of this where i find someone new and we begin at the beginning. but you cannot hand a person a year. you cannot pass notes. the whole point is the slowness of being known, and the thought of doing that slowness again, from zero, with someone who does not yet know when i am performing, makes me tired in a way i don’t have a good word for.

so i am sitting with it. not fixing it yet. just sitting.

it feels like being asked to leave a house i never fully walked into. and the strangest grief is not for what happened there. it is for the version of me who kept the door shut for a year and then felt genuinely, honestly wounded that no one came in.

~ ~