Love Did That #2
“There wasn’t room,” I said finally. “Simone was twelve, having panic attacks. Zion started swinging at anything that moved. Tre was fifteen and getting into things he had no business in. My father was wasting away. I looked around and did the math, and the math said if I went down too, there was nobody left. So I didn’t go down. ”
“So you decided your grief would have to wait.”
“I didn’t need to grieve. Not in the way they did. There was no time for that.”
“Julian, how long ago did your mother die?”
“Eighteen years.”
“And in eighteen years, have you ever sat down and just processed it? Absorbed and examined how that loss affected you?”
I didn’t answer, because the answer was never.
“What would it look like? Living instead of surviving? If you ever let yourself.”
I thought about the piano in the back room of my house.
Covered, oiled, perfect, silent. The songs that used to come out of me.
The thing my father had handed me before he handed me nothing.
I thought about the day Alyssa sang and my hands had remembered every note, like something waking up that I’d put to sleep on purpose.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t want to go there yet.
“You said your father slept on the floor by the marital bed.”
“Yes.”
“What did you learn, witnessing that?”
I looked at the photograph on his wall. The mountain with no people in it.
“That love did that.”
“Love did what.”
“That.”
“Say it, Julian.”
“Killed him.” It came out flat and it kept coming. “It killed him. He didn’t physically die, but it killed him. My mother was dead and my father was dead in spirit, and I decided in that moment I was never going to die that way. Not ever. Not in my life.”
I hadn’t said that out loud before either.
I sat in the chair and registered, with a small shame, that I had held something that size for that long without once putting it where another person could see it.
“Julian.”
“Yes.”
“Take a breath.”
I took a breath.
“You’re not going to die from this conversation.”
“I know.”
“Your body doesn’t. Your body has spent years treating a conversation like this one as a thing that could kill you. We’re going to teach it something different, and that takes time. So when I tell you to take a breath, take it. Your body needs the practice.”
I took another.
“Better,” he said. He looked at me a while. “You said something a minute ago. Love did that. I want to come back to it. Not today. Today we just sat. But I want you to know that’s the work. That sentence, and everything you’ve built around it, and what it’s cost you. You ready for that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the right answer.”
The light in the room had moved while I talked. The clock said 3:17.
“I'd like to see you twice a week to start if you are able. Then we can cut back to weekly.”
“I don't think that's necessary—”
“Julian.” He looked at me directly. “You've been carrying eighteen years of unprocessed grief. It's going to take more than one session to work through it.”
“Same time next week?”
“Okay.”
I went every week and stopped sitting in the parking lot. I didn’t tell anyone. Zion would have been unbearable. Simone would have cried. Tre would have found a way to make a joke about it.
And every week I didn’t call her. Wanting to didn’t ease; if anything it got worse as my mind got clearer, because the clearer I got the more I understood what I’d let walk out of my door that day.
But I held the line. Three weeks of running alone in the mornings.
Three weeks of a bed that had learned the shape of two people.
I missed her in a way that had stopped being manageable, and I did not reach, because I refused to walk up to her as a half-built thing asking to be loved the rest of the way into shape.
“You look different,” Dr. Matthews said at my third session. “Less braced.”
“I slept through the night.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” he said. “Today, I want to go back to your father. The letter. Can you recall what it said?”
I could still see his handwriting. “That we’d be better off without him. That he’d only drag us down. That he loved us too much to let us watch what he was turning into.”
“What did you think about that back then?”
“I thought about it as weakness. As failure. As what happens when you let emotions take over instead of keeping your shit together.”
Dr. Matthews nodded slowly. “So strength, in your mind, means not feeling things.”
“Means feeling them but not letting them control you. Don't let feelings make you useless to the people who need you.”
“When you say useless...”
“I mean like my father. Unable to function. Unable to take care of anyone, even himself.”
“So your value comes from your ability to take care of others.” The way he said it made it sound wrong somehow.
“Doesn't everyone's?”
“No.”
The simple answer hit me like cold water.
“Julian, what if I told you your worth isn't tied to how much you can do for other people?”
“I'd say you don't know me very well.”
“I'm getting to know you.” He leaned forward slightly. “And what I see is someone who's been carrying an incredible burden since he was barely an adult. Someone who stepped up when the adults in his life couldn't. That takes remarkable strength.”
I nodded.
“But strength and hypercompetence aren't the same thing. Taking care of everyone else while ignoring your own needs isn't sustainable.”
“It's worked for years.”
“Has it? Let me ask you a question: do you think your father needed help, back then?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “He had a breakdown. He needed help.”
“Did he take it?”
“No. He wouldn’t let any of us near it. Everybody tried. He’d rather have left than let one person help him carry it.”