Therapy Bits

Thanks to Fandango for hosting!

Fandango’s Story Starter #226 – Facts, Fictions & Fantasies

The older she got, the less sure she was about anything.

At twenty, she had believed certainty was a muscle: the more you used it, the stronger it became. She had spoken in clean sentences back then, unafraid of periods. By thirty-five, her thoughts arrived with parentheses and asterisks. By forty-eight, even questions felt too confident.

On her birthday, she woke before dawn, the house quiet except for the refrigerator’s low hum—an appliance that seemed far too assured of its purpose. She lay in bed and tried to remember the last thing she’d decided without revising it later. The color of the kitchen walls? Repainted twice. The career she’d chosen? A series of detours explained politely as “experience.” The marriage? Well. That one she didn’t think about before coffee.

She shuffled to the window and watched the streetlight blink off, as if conceding the day. When she was young, she had believed mornings were promises. Now they felt more like negotiations.

In the kitchen, she reached for her favorite mug—the blue one with a chipped lip—and hesitated. Tea or coffee? She laughed softly at herself and chose water, which felt like refusing to take sides. The calendar on the fridge announced her age in thick black marker, written by her sister with a smiley face that leaned a little to the right. She considered erasing it, then decided the evidence might be useful later.

There was a letter on the table she hadn’t opened. It had been there for a week, its corners curling slightly, as if it were losing patience. The return address was unfamiliar, which made it feel important in a way bills never did. She had imagined what it might contain: an apology, an inheritance, a mistake. Each possibility had grown dull with repetition.

She sat, finally, and slid a finger under the envelope’s edge. Inside was a single page, typed, the font formal but not unkind.

I don’t know if you’ll remember me, it began, which immediately made her bristle because of course she wouldn’t. Or maybe she would. The letter was from a woman she had known briefly in her twenties, someone she’d shared a rented apartment with for six months and a reckless belief that life was a ladder. They had fought once—about nothing important—and then drifted apart with the efficiency of people who assume there will be time later.

The letter was an invitation. The woman was ill, it said, and wanted to see a few people from earlier chapters of her life. Not for closure, exactly. Just to sit together and remember how certain they had once been.

She read the page twice, then folded it neatly and placed it back in the envelope, as though returning a borrowed thought. Her first instinct was to decline. Travel was tiring. Reunions were traps. Nostalgia had sharp edges.

But as she stood to rinse her glass, she realized something small and unsettling: she couldn’t find a good reason not to go. Not a responsible one, not a fearful one. Just a blank space where certainty used to live.

She called her sister. She stared at the phone for a full minute before dialing, because even that felt like a commitment. When her sister answered, cheerful and already mid-story, she listened for a while, grateful for the momentum of someone else’s confidence.

“I might take a trip,” she said finally.

“That’s new,” her sister replied, amused. “Where to?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she said, and meant both the destination and the decision. She waited for advice, for a push in one direction.

Instead, her sister said, “Tell me when you know.”

After the call, she packed a small bag, then unpacked it, then left it open on the bed. She stood in the doorway and looked at her life—the careful furniture, the framed photos, the shoes lined up like obedient thoughts. None of it objected to her leaving. None of it insisted she stay.

That afternoon, she bought a train ticket. She chose a seat by the window without overthinking it, which surprised her enough that she smiled. The ticket printed with a decisive whirr, confident as the refrigerator.

On the day of the trip, she boarded early and settled in, watching the platform fill with people who seemed sure of where they were going. As the train began to move, she felt the familiar rise of doubt—Was this a mistake? Had she misunderstood the letter? Would the past recognize her?

But beneath the questions, there was something else, quieter and steadier. Not certainty. Something better, maybe. A willingness.

The landscape slid by in shades of green and gray, and she rested her head against the window. For the first time in a long while, she didn’t try to resolve her thoughts into a clean sentence. She let them remain unfinished, trailing off like the tracks ahead.

She wasn’t sure what she would find at the end of the line. She wasn’t sure who she would be when she arrived. And for once, the uncertainty didn’t feel like a failure.

It felt like room.