Therapy Bits

It was not my idea, but it happened.

The bell had just rung and the hallway emptied like a held breath finally released. I stood in the doorway while Ms. Alvarez stacked essays into careful towers, the red pen capped, uncapped, capped again. My hands smelled like pencil shavings and sweat. I hadn’t planned to stay. My feet had stopped me.

“What’s up?” she asked, not looking yet, the way adults do when they’re giving you a chance to decide.

I told her the weather first. I told her my locker was jammed. I told her I liked the book we were reading because the hero ran away and still lived. She nodded to each small, safe thing. Then she looked up, really looked, and the room went quiet enough to hear the clock scrape the seconds together.

“It’s not—” I started, and stopped. The sentence fell apart. I stared at the poster behind her desk, the one that said Speak Kindly. I wondered if words could bruise.

She pulled out a chair. “Sit,” she said, gently, like an invitation and a command at once.

I didn’t say the worst parts. I didn’t know how. I said I didn’t feel safe at home. I said someone got angry. I said I was scared of evenings. Each sentence felt like handing over a stone I’d been carrying so long my hands were shaped around it.

She didn’t gasp. She didn’t ask why I hadn’t said something sooner. She listened the way people do when they mean it, with her whole body leaning toward mine. When I finished, she wrote my name on a yellow pad and tore the page free, as if my words needed a door to walk through.

“You did the right thing,” she said. Not loud. Certain.

Later, there were other rooms and other voices and a man who brought me a blanket even though it wasn’t cold. The story got retold in pieces. Some pieces I kept.

What I remember most is the moment before everything changed: chalk dust floating in the light, the clock ticking, and the feeling—new and fragile—that if I said it out loud, it might not own me anymore.

Reena’s Xploration Challenge #411 – Creative Experiments and More