Page 100 of Don't Tell

She nods.

"Are you here because you want her back, or because you want to be better."

I open my mouth and close it.

I sit with it.

"The first one."

"Mmm…"

"Is that wrong?"

"It is not wrong. I'm asking you which is harder to answer."

I look at her.

She does not give me the answer. She does not lean forward in the chair and tell me the second one. She just looks at me with the small unreadable patience of a woman who has been doing this for forty years and has decided to wait the way she always waits.

She asks me about my father.

I answer her with fewer words than I thought I would.

She asks me about the woman.

I answer her with even fewer.

I arrive at it in the middle of a sentence I'm making about something else.

" — and so I have spent my whole adult life building a life nobody could reach me inside. I'm good at it. It worked. I have been not-reachable for twenty years. The problem is I have met a woman I want to let in, and I keep — I keep handling her instead.Every time I'm afraid I'm going to lose her, I tighten my grip. And every time I tighten my grip she has less room. I'm doing the thing I'm most afraid of and it's costing me."

She does not congratulate me for saying it.

"What do you think you should do?"

"Stop."

"Stopping is harder than it sounds."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I look at her.

"Mr. Nightingale, the men I see in this office who are good at handling things are the men who have the hardest time stopping. The handling is the apparatus you have built to keep yourself safe. You have used it for twenty years and it has worked. I'm not going to ask you to take it apart in one hour."

"What do you ask?"

"That you notice when you are reaching for it. The first ten times you notice you will already have used it. The next ten times you will catch yourself in the middle. And then, eventually, you will realize before you have to reach for it. That is the work. It is not glamorous and it does not happen this week."

I sit with it.

"Okay."

I stand fifteen minutes before the hour is up.

"I'm going to leave."