Page 19 of Letters From A Stalker

“Enough to remain alive.” The phrasing is intentionally flippant.

My jaw tightens, and Julia notices immediately. “I wasn’t suicidal.”

“I know. Your intake was clear about that.”

“Then why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like I said something concerning.”

“You described keeping yourself alive as the standard rather than caring for yourself.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“No, Julia. It’s precise.” The use of her name stills her.

I keep my voice calm, even though irritation is beginning to move beneath my ribs. It isn’t directed at her. It’s for every useless asshole who watched her carry something unbearable and praised her for functioning instead of asking whether she could breathe beneath the weight of it.

“What happened when they found him?” I ask.

Her eyes lose focus. “The police asked for my DNA.”

The sentence changes the air between us. Although the detail was included in her intake, hearing it in her voice strips away the clinical neatness of the written account. She says it as if she’s standing outside the memory rather than inside it, but the pressure of her fingers around the bottle suggests otherwise.

“He’d been outside too long for visual identification,” she continues. “They needed to confirm the body was his.”

“And once they did?”

“I started planning the funeral.”

The way she said that, with a casualness that implied it was the normal thing to do, didn’t really match the pain that rippled through the calm green on her eyes, and it made me want to fucking punch through a wall. It also made me painfully aware that the further we went into this session, my personal reactions were slowly taking over and I needed to find my way back to my usual calm and clinical behaviour.

“Your intake says you handled most of the arrangements yourself.” I bring it back to facts I know about her. The order of things will help me recalibrate.

“My mother wasn’t capable of doing it, and his girlfriend was grieving. Someone had to speak to the funeral home, choose the coffin, decide what he’d wear, call relatives, arrange food. It was mostly logistics.”

There it is. Pain being reduced to tasks because tasks can be completed, checked off, and controlled.

“Do you often turn difficult experiences into logistics?”

She gives me a long look. “Do you often ask questions when you already know the answer?”

“Yes.” I reply simply.

“Why?”

“Because what I notice isn’t always the same as what you understand about yourself.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It can be.”

“For both of us?”

“Probably.”

She almost smiles, but her attention drops before it fully forms.