Page 94 of Breakaway
"I didn't think there was. I thought the useful version was the real version and everything else was just…but then I didn't know who was there."
Gwen is quiet for a moment. Then she leans forward slightly.
"I want to stay with something you said. You said you couldn't be the partner who showed up every day. That the function was gone. But you also couldn't tell anyone here why you were falling apart."
"No."
"Because of hiding your relationship with Wes."
The words land. It is not the words I would have used in February. In February it was the arrangement, the situation, the way things were.
"Because of the hiding. Yeah."
"What did the hiding cost you, Luca? When you got to Atlanta and the function was gone and you were falling apart?"
I look at the ceiling. The tiles are the same tiles. The light fixture has a dead bug in it that has been there since my first session. I have never mentioned it. The dead bug is familiar now.
"It cost me things that could have helped." My voice is steady and I am speaking slowly because each word is hard to say. "Thompson sat across from me at dinner and told me I looked like someone died. And he was right but I couldn't tell him why. Marchetti called me every week and I couldn't explain why I didn’t want to leave my place, why I wasn't eating. They would have been there for me. But that meant saying his name which wasn’t useful."
"The useful thing."
"The useful thing was staying hidden. Making myself invisible so the relationship could function." I hear myself say it and it’s not the words are said that I see how true it is. "The move and the distance broke me. But the hiding is what kept me going down. The hiding meant I couldn't reach for anything."
Gwen is still. Her pen has not moved.
"You see the pattern," she says. "You said you don't think you know how to be a person who isn't useful and when you stopbeing useful you stop being a person. The pattern that kept you from asking for help when you needed it most."
"Yeah."
"Is it true? That there's nobody underneath?"
"It's what I've believed."
"I know. I'm asking you a different question. Is it true?"
I am in the green chair and the light is on the plant and my face is wet and I am being asked whether the sentence that has organized my entire life is true.
"I don't know," I say. "I think it's what I learned. I don't know if it's true."
Her voice is warm and level when she says, "Can you sit with that for a minute?"
My hands are open on the arms of the chair and my face is wet and I am wrung out.
"Same time next Thursday?" she says.
"Same time next Thursday."
"You did real work today, Luca."
"It doesn't feel like work. It feels like I’m still falling."
"Sometimes we have to go through the uncomfortable and messy for progress to happen."
I stand. She stands. Her handshake is warm and unhurried the way it was in February, the way it has been every time, the greeting that asks nothing except that I showed up.
The hallway. The stairs. The parking lot. I sit in my car and I don't turn it on. Through the windshield the sky is white going gold, the afternoon softening toward evening. My phone is on the console. The wallpaper with the blue water and white railing. I look at it for a long time. It looks like a photograph. It has looked like a window into a life I lost, and today, it looks like a picture of a place I used to live.
I open the camera roll. I scroll until I find the one from last week: Mouse on the counter, her paw on a lime, her face severe. I took it to send to Wes and then forgot.
