I stopped seeing my therapist when she called me deeply lonely. Not because I disagreed but because she said it like a diagnosis. Like we were to stop trying to fix it and now speak only of ways to incorporate it smoothly into my day to day. There are many ways to give up on a person and the subtle, unnamed ones frustrate me the most. She said a lot of other things about me that weren’t as true but I stayed with her because one of the things we agreed I’d work on was commitment. Plus, she was the cheapest doctor I could find in a 20-mile radius.We talked about mental loads and decided that traveling more than an hour and a half in LA for therapy would undo the work of therapy and max me out. I liked that phrase. She suggested I start using it for myself. “I’m maxed out.” It’s been working. It worked so well with my ex that he left. 

It probably wasn’t just because of the phrase. I think he started to hate me. He never said it but his love started to feel like a promise he made to someone who had died long ago. We talked more and more about how I needed to change to be more myself. “Maybe if you stayed still,” he’d say, “you could figure out what you were supposed to be doing and not be so down all the time.” Or something like, “your body has so much potential, people with your genes are so beautiful. You just have to put in more work. Don’t waste it baby, don’t waste it.” Then he’d kiss me on the forehead and continue watching his shows. He was never all the way mean to me so I couldn’t hate him back. I guess I did hate him but couldn't ever end it. He coordinated his kisses and compliments perfectly. The bad would always be diluted before it morphed into the type of bad that warrants an end. Now I have way more space than I need. Whatever the opposite of maxed out is. This is the sort of thing we were talking about when she called me deeply lonely. I guess my ex was the thing keeping me on the border of functioning and “the dangerous kind of lonely.” 

I never thought emotions could be dangerous until my therapist used the words. She put down her clipboard and scooted to the edge of her chair. She folded her hands in her lap and didn’t blink a single time. I thought she was going to reach out and grab my hands but she didn’t. She said, “This is dangerous, Ijeoma.” I didn't know what she was referring to. I had said so much right before she went into slow motion. 

She scooted further forward and rewound herself. “It sounds like this is bigger than being alone... or… independent.” She said the last word in a way that meant I had been using it wrong but she didn’t want to tell me why and how yet because that wasn't as pressing as the other things. 

I tried to back up. She felt too close. But I was already up against the wall. There was nothing behind me except the back of the chair and too many hard pillows which I’d throw aside but always found their way back to my body. 

“Sometimes feelings are more than feelings,” which didn’t make sense but I nodded because I didn’t really want her to continue. I was hoping we were out of time. But I couldn’t check because when we first started seeing each other I asked her to hide the clocks. Our sessions always started a few seconds later than they should’ve because she had a client right before who wasn’t afraid of time like me. Sixty minutes is never enough time to talk about what happened or is happening in a life. I've only ever had one doctor who was okay with me staying in the room after my time was up. He wouldn't keep talking to me or anything but he left the noise machine on, handed me a to-go package of tissues, closed the door behind him, and said the couch was mine for forty more minutes. I think he knew it was his fault—asking me open-ended questions with only five minutes left. 

I watched each neon number come and go. I noticed the number 8's shadow is always there, waiting. The other numbers appear by filling in two or more of the seven blocks that make the phantom 8. The 1 takes two; the 2 and 3, five; 4, four; 5, five; 6, six; 7, three; 8 seven; 9, six; 0, six. I kept trying to hold the last number in mind when the minute changed but couldn't. It could only ever be itself plus the faded outlines of all the spaces it wasn't. But there was enough time that day. She continued. 

“Sometimes feelings become behaviors. And so then, then, the feeling can be dangerous.” I grabbed a pillow and held it in my lap. She was now only pretending to sit in her seat but was more hovering in front of it. So our knees could almost touch if either of us moved.

Ok, I said, ok. I know that. But I'm not depressed. 

She almost reached out. I saw her flinch then change her mind. Her hands looked dry and I wondered if she cared or noticed that I looked at her so closely. She said I do a lot of things to feel more equal and powerful. Maybe I judged her because she was judging me, we hadn’t gotten to that yet in our sessions. I was glad she didn’t fully reach out and comfort me. It would be more for her than for me. And I would only be able to think about how she was eroding my softness to assuage her own ego. 

“I’m not saying you're depressed. Depression is such a big big word. I wouldn't say that.” But you said dangerous. 

She scooted back and let herself blink, “You seem. Deeply. Lonely.” 

And I started to pick at the threaded decorations of the pillow which was really a word in teal cursive with tiny colorful beads between all the loopey parts. Friendship is what this one said even though that seemed odd since she’d told me so many times that we weren’t friends and this wasn’t that kind of relationship and that I should be careful to not think of her as a friend, much less a best friend, but she was the one giving me pillows that basically said we were exactly that. If we ever got to the point where we got to switch roles and it was my turn, this was one of the eleven things I would tell her about herself. “Mixed messages,” I’d say staring into her mascara heavy eyes, “Are. Dangerous.” 

I said a lot of yes’s and I don’t knows but knew that it would be the last time I saw her. It made me a little sad but not too much because at the end of the day, I didn’t really know her at all. Only what she did for work and a tiny bit about how she thought. But maybe I didn’t even know that because maybe none of what she said was her opinion in the first place. She went to school for nine years to learn how to rethink about thinking and I think that's the version of her that I was getting. If she believed all the things she said then she would probably be too perfect to be a therapist, couldn’t empathize, and wouldn’t want to be bothered with humans like me still figuring it all out. I warned her “It takes 7 years to forget me” when I left that day. I didn't know if it was true. Still, it’s the sort of false that’s hard to forget, the kind that lingers and haunts. I told my boss I was sick and didn’t go to work the next two days. 

On the third day, I worked again. It’s really easy to get rid of memories when you pack your present full of new stuff. Even if the new stuff is old and not what you want either, it still works. If I start to miss our talks, I open my eyes in the real way and name all the green things. Trees, leaf, the stranger’s sweater. When I run out of green, I do red or blue or brown. The other day I counted ten brown people on my walk home. I looked them in the eye and told them their number. You are four, I’d say, and smile. All different shades. I’d always wonder what number I was to them. I liked doing purple the most because there’s barely any purple in the world and so you really have to look. If more people were looking for purple, I think there’d be more of it. 

The therapist before the one I just broke up with taught me that trick. She asked me once to close my eyes and think of when I was little. I ended up in a bathroom. I was maybe ten years old and naked and scrubbing myself clean with the loofah my mom bought for the girls. It was pink and hurt a little as it cleaned you. 

“Try looking around and see who else is in the room. What else is happening?” And so with my eyes wrinkled shut, I looked and saw my father. I could tell it was from before he was deported because he was smiling with his whole mouth open. His eyes weren’t yet yellowed from the disappearance and the brown of his skin looked less like old mud, still like my brown. 

“What’s going on?” 

I thought it was rude she asked again. I felt like she, of all people, should understand that time travel takes time. I watched my father in that corner of the bathroom make his way to me in the shower. I was moving my mouth but all I remember is the sound of all the running water: my shower, the His and Hers faucets he turned on before he came closer. How cold the body feels pulled fresh from hot water, how if you stare at yourself and your father in a fogging mirror you both start to look like one large body, lacking details, only the color of skin, only contours that can’t capture subtle movements. Ghosts. All I remember is how hard it is to choke, how impossible it is to drown even when surrounded, even when you want it.

“What’s going on, how are you feeling?” 

She said that my body did this thing bodies sometimes do where they ‘eat themselves.’ And the only way out is to remind yourself what parts are what—separate the inside parts from the outside ones, that the eyes and heartbeat do the best job at reorganizing. “The thing about the past is that sometimes it reincarnates as words and photos and smells and other times it’s just a feeling, something only the body knows how to read and react to.” 

I put my hand on my belly and watched it lift and fall and she asked me to find all the red in the room. A few circles in an abstract painting hanging above her bookshelf, the candle on her desk that’s never lit because it’d be a fire hazard with all that paperwork she’ll “get to,” and my shoes. I stopped answering her calls after that. She left a message two months later saying sorry we both couldn’t take care of me. 

The therapist I’m seeing tomorrow is called Carol. In her website photo, she’s wearing a satin, lavender button up shirt. She won out because she was the closest Dr. Carol to my house: 11 miles. I like that her name sounds like care but also careful. Things like that matter sometimes, those almosts.