Therapy Speak

Two years since Richard came inside her without asking, then rolled onto his back, shirt still on, and mentioned, almost as an afterthought, the way you'd mention you were out of milk, that he wasn't into her "physical body type." One year since Andrew asked her to his mother's funeral, then forty-eight hours after she'd spent an afternoon plating deviled eggs for people who would never learn her name, told her things were "moving too fast." Six months since Dan wanted a break to focus on a job he didn't get and a move he never made. Two weeks since Adam, over a Heineken she has never once ordered, a fact he has apparently never clocked in the entire time she's known him, said he couldn't feel joy, even with her.

A body count of men, and a matching body count of therapy years: 15, 16, 16.7, 17.2. She's down twenty pounds. She still checks under her ribs for the muscle, just to confirm it's real and not something she talked herself into.

Celine Dion is playing off her phone. She stopped burning her actual favorite songs on grief a long time ago - those get rationed for things that deserve them. Celine is for whatever this turns out to be.

Two weeks ago, on a random Tuesday. Dinner and a movie - sort of their ritual. Adam had the fidgety energy he asked questions aimlessly into the frantic air that surrounded him and absorbed none of the answers. Walking to the movie, she took his hand out of habit, the way you'd reach for a railing, and felt him flinch. She filed it under probably nothing, a folder she has kept impeccably organized over the course of her decade of dating.

In the theater, his knee bounced like a metronome. Afterward, he asked if she wanted a drink, in a tone she didn't recognize on him. She said sure. He ordered two Heinekens. She has told him three times she doesn't like Heineken. He isn't a bad man. He's just a man who has never once had to remember anything about her, because she has always remembered everything for the both of them.

"So," she said, doing the thing where you ask a question you already know the shape of the answer to. "What's up? You seem off."

She's said that sentence so many times now it's stopped feeling like a question and started feeling like a cue... the line she says right before the scene happens, the one the room already knows is coming.

Two years earlier. Same line, different man. Richard, reaching for his shoes with unnecessary urgency. "Ah, nothing... I just forgot I had something to do."

She let it go, because her therapist had spent a lot of money teaching her that you can't attach feelings to facts you don't have yet. Maybe he did have something to do. Twelve hours later, she had the facts. He texted that he wanted to be honest, "because I know you value honesty." Her friends called him a dick. One of them, generously, upgraded him to a small, insecure dick. None of it moved the woman in the mirror, who had never once thought of herself as fat and now thought about nothing else.

"I don't know, I just can't-" Adam's hands did something complicated in the air, like he was trying to build the feeling into a shape he could hand her instead of saying out loud. "Shake this."

She knows this posture. She's watched anxiety live in a man's shoulders before. She's carried her own for thirty-four years and has walked the outer edge of depression so many times she could lead the tour. She understood completely and had nothing to say that would change anything about what he'd already decided.

"You're just having a bad day," she offered - a line pulled from either a therapy session or a self-help book; she genuinely couldn't tell anymore, they'd started to blur. He heard how empty it was and, somehow, made it worse. "Don't you think I should feel something? About life, dating, anything?"

Yes, she thought, with real violence. Yes, congratulations, welcome to being human. What she said was, "You won't always feel like this." Recycled. She could feel it coming out already worn, like a shirt she'd put on for the second time that week.

One year earlier, same sentence, gentler circumstances. She'd pushed Andrew's hair back and wiped a tear off his face with her thumb, on the church steps after his mother's funeral, and told him he wouldn't always feel this way. She meant it. Andrew was quiet and steady in a way that had, for once, felt like something she could stand on. He'd squeezed her hand once during the service and told her he was glad she came. The next day he wrote her, full sentences, actual punctuation, that he'd been reflecting, and this was moving too fast.

She had spent the afternoon washing vegetables and arranging them on platters in a church basement for a woman she'd never met, and forty-eight hours later she was the one moving too fast. She has never once in her life felt like she was moving fast. Mostly she has felt like a woman standing very still while men rearrange the furniture around her and then leave because the room "isn't working."

"It's not a bad week," Adam said, with the sudden clarity of a man finally saying the true thing. "I've felt like this since before I knew you." Which meant: not fixable, not new, not about her. But, also, somehow, entirely about her, since she was the one still sitting there. Their friends had said they had something. Other people had seen it too, which she'd taken, foolishly, as corroborating evidence, the way a second witness makes a UFO sighting feel like fact.

"Maybe we should—" he started, unable to hold her eyes the way he used to, like she'd become a view he'd simply gotten used to.

"—take a break," Dan had said, six months before that, watching a Cavs highlight over her shoulder instead of looking at her. His body blocked the one window in the bar with decent light, which felt, in hindsight, like it was trying to tell her something. "Work's up in the air. Might be moving. Doesn't feel fair to keep dating."

"What doesn't feel fair," she wanted to say, "is that I asked you directly - once, twice, fifteen times - when I noticed you checking out other women, when you forgot my birthday, when you went cold for a week and called it busy. And every single time you told me I was imagining it." She didn't say any of that. It just screamed around the inside of her skull while her mouth produced "okay," and his produced "I'm sorry," and they finished their drinks like that was a complete conversation. His eyes never left the TV.

In the present, Molly looked down and found her hands shaking, faintly. Her entire rolodex of therapeutic responses - the ones she'd paid seventeen years and one mildly alarming credit card balance to acquire - jammed all at once, pages stuck together.

She pushed her chair back and left the bar. She knew it was the wrong move. The unkind move. We don't storm out, Molly, we use our words, this person is just telling you have they feel. But she also knew, underneath the therapy, underneath every benefit of the doubt she had ever extended to a man across tables, that the warning signs had never once been wrong. Her anxiety and her heart, unlike everyone else's apparently, had a decent working relationship. They looked out for each other. It was her mind that kept overruling the vote.

It'll be fine, Molly, said something inside her - heart, gut, or the vodka soda from dinner, all three now functionally interchangeable. You'll find someone else.

"Why should I believe you?" she said. To him. To all of them. To her own mind. To herself.