one week out from writing the letter. things feel different. not fixed. different.
the session #
brought it to dr r tuesday like she asked. read parts of it out loud.
not my favorite experience. there’s something about speaking the words instead of just having them on a screen that makes them more real in an uncomfortable way. she said that was the point. embodied vs intellectual. we’ve been talking about that distinction a lot lately.
she said the work i did was real. that the anger had somewhere to go now instead of just sitting in my chest calcifying.
she asked how i felt after reading it.
i said lighter. not better, not healed, not whatever. just lighter. like something shifted a couple inches.
dr r said that’s integration starting. the process of the loss becoming part of who i am rather than something that lives separate from me, crashing into my life from outside whenever it wants.
two more sessions focused on that. integration. i’ll believe it when i stop expecting it.
she had on this silk blouse thing tuesday that was doing things it probably shouldn’t in a therapy context. mid-40s, looks 35, can hold space for my dead parent trauma AND look like that simultaneously. it’s a confusing hour every week. a thinks it’s hilarious. i’ve stopped trying to explain it.
a quiet saturday #
she got back from her run at 8:15. i was still asleep.
she made coffee, sat at her desk, didn’t wake me up. when i finally got up around 10 she was deep in something - python data pipeline stuff for a client she’s been working with. headphones on. full-focus mode.
i poured coffee. sat at my desk. checked positions: options flat, BTC up 0.3%, ETH had a weird overnight spike that my algo caught and closed out nicely. nothing needed me.
we worked parallel for like two hours. her music bleeding through her headphones, my grafana dashboards cycling through metrics, occasional saturday traffic from the window.
this is probably my favorite thing we do. not talking. just existing in the same space while we both do our shit. she doesn’t need to fill silence and neither do i. i didn’t know how rare that was until i found someone who also doesn’t know how to fake it.
around noon she pulled one earbud out: “lunch?”
yeah.
cooking lesson 4 #
she’s been assigning me one meal a week. the deal is 10 meals without a fire department visit and she delivers a balcony item from her wishlist. the stakes are real.
lesson 1 was stir fry. went okay. lesson 2 was scrambled eggs from scratch with actual technique. better than expected. lesson 3 was pasta carbonara. overcooked the pasta. she said “close enough, still counts.”
tonight was lesson 4: roasted chicken thighs. she set me up with everything prepped - she wouldn’t let me touch the prep because apparently the first thing to master is “just cook it, don’t fuck it up while it’s in the oven.”
i did not fuck it up.
forty-five minutes, 425 degrees. skin came out crispy. internal temp was right. she tasted it and made this face she does when she’s genuinely surprised.
“okay. that was actually really good.”
i did not say anything. just stared at her with full eye contact while taking another bite.
she texted her mom. obviously. there’s a hundred percent a family group chat about my culinary progress. i’ve accepted this.
what’s different #
the week felt quieter. not in a bad way. the heavy thing that’s been sitting in my chest for three years is still there but it’s not static anymore. it’s moving. like water instead of concrete.
dr r said that’s what grieving properly looks like eventually. it stops being a wall and starts being a river. you don’t lose it, it just starts flowing somewhere.
i think i believe her. i didn’t believe her in december.
a’s been around differently this week too. she’s not making a thing out of it. just shows up more physically. hand on my shoulder when she walks by. sitting closer on the couch when we watch stuff. wednesday night we were both working late and she just came over, leaned against me for like 30 seconds, then went back to her desk.
didn’t say anything. didn’t need to.
1:47 AM #
she’s asleep. algorithms running. san diego quiet.
april feels like a better month. no particular reason. it just does.
-AK