“I'll love you forever, even once I'm gone.”
Why did you say that? Did you know it would be that night? On that night, you whispered those words to me in our bed, you let me in your arms, unsuspecting and unaware. You gave those seconds to us, to the silence of our love. I woke to you in our bed, except it wasn't ours anymore, and you weren't there, and so it became my bed that I awoke in. Sometime during that night you left, I don't know when, when the arms around me weren't there anymore. I felt those words on me, but I wasn't there to hear them.
“It’s been a month since your husband's passing Ms.Alverez, and you haven't addressed it, is that not why you come here though?" My therapist, Amanda, asked, leaning close to me from her ugly yellow couch.
I started seeing a therapist two weeks after my husband had left. She always says the same things, that I need to cope, that I need to open up and address the truth, but it won’t change anything, it won’t change what happened.
“You said different people need different amounts of time to heal.” She said that when I first started seeing her.
“Yes, but you can only begin your healing process when you accept what happened, you continue to deny it and avoid the topic during our sessions. You think you’re saving yourself from it but you're making it harder for both of you.” She looks at me with nothing in her eyes, no pity that I see from my friends and family, not the empathy from strangers, nothing but my own sad reflection.
We sat there in silence for what felt like hours, but it was only seconds. The timer finally went off, signaling the end of this session. Thank God.
“That’s all the time we have for today, the holidays are coming up so I wont be free for a while, you can still call me if you need anything. I would recommend that you try some of the techniques I showed you.” She kept speaking, she talks a lot.
What were those techniques anyway?
That couch really is a horribly blue color.
