Page 45 of You Can't Hurt Me

Patient X: “No, though sometimes I wish I were.”

Patient X stifles a laugh at this point, which I read as a defense mechanism, a sign of more beneath it. I watch emotions struggle on their face, how their eyes darken with the anguish of remembering. For a moment I think they’re about to cry and my instinct is to reach across to comfort them, but I hold back. Instead, as Janet has encouraged me to do, I reflect on the feelings they’re provoking in me.

It’s funny how the consulting room is our very own theater of emotions, separate from the outside world. Whatever feelings arise in this one-hour session are no more real than projections played upon a movie screen.

Patient X: “I guess there’s a lot of baggage with my family. For a long time, I carried all of this guilt, but I’m not prepared to do that anymore.”

Me: “Why not, what’s happened?”

Patient X: Sighs heavily. “I can’t say. Not now, not yet—”

Me: “What I’m sensing is a desire in you for change, for these feelings to break to the surface, but perhaps also a fear about the consequences that may bring?”

Patient X: “I feel I can tell you, but—”

Me: “I’m here for you. Seriously, trust me on this. I think we both know it’s time to rip away the sticking Band-Aid, find out what’s underneath?”

16

All About You

We are all alone in our pain because whatever we feel is notoriously difficult to share and communicate, and never more so than when we’re actually in the throes of agony. In her essayOn Being Ill, Virginia Woolf noted, “...There is the poverty of language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache... The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” Over the centuries, medicine has compensated for this limitation, devising its own index to measure pain.

In the ’70s, Dr. Ronald Melzack began to classify the words patients used most often, includingshooting,radiating,stabbing,sickening, etc. This evolved to become the standard measure—The McGill Pain Questionnaire—still widely used in pain clinics around the world.

I keep my phone close in the days that follow our kiss, but Nate doesn’t text me. I don’t—won’t—text him. As the time goes by, our trip to the coast takes on a surreal quality. Images ripple and flicker in my thoughts, leaving a dangerous afterglow, a slow burn of desire and despair. It should have been me that drew a line, acted like a grown-up, not him. I despise myself for wanting him more because of the restraint he displayed.

I distract myself as best I can, run to the river early each morning, watch as the sky ripens from peach pink to deep plum.

Stay in motion. My app tells me I’ll burn 520 calories and cut my time by thirty seconds if I keep to my current pace. I focus on my breath. Inhale for five seconds, exhale for five seconds. Yet memory curls like smoke through the cracks. His fingertips on my hip bone, the melt of his mouth on mine. I blame him for this sabotage, that my mind is no longer my own, a rogue state I can no longer govern.

Last thing at night, first thing in the morning, he is there. Is it physical attraction, or something else too? The way we’re both shackled to a past that we don’t deserve, desperate to break away and start again. Or, if I’m honest, isn’t it his unavailability that seduces me more?

I try to divert myself, plan out a new structure for the book. I set targets, deadlines, but my defenses are down. What did we agree on the journey back, that he’d text first on Friday or that I’d go straight to Algos House?

On my run, I speed past rows of gloomy redbrick mansion apartments, beyond the tennis courts and the overpriced garden center. Cutting through the tunnel under the railway arches, I feel the strain in my chest and sprint for the last two minutes, savoring the burn because I know I can stop it whenever I wish. That at least pain is within my control.

Tony is already there on the terrace outside the café, huddled under a blue umbrella and nursing a coffee. In the cold air, his watery eyes take in my jogging gear, narrowing into an expression of bemusement. For him, any form of exercise is a perverse affectation to be avoided at all costs.

“Hi, sis.” He waves. “I could do with another, if you’re buying.” In the morning light I notice his skin looks papery and gray.

“Heavy night?”

“Part of the new regime, is it, jogging every day?” he bats back at me. “Must be getting in shape for someone?”

I avoid the insinuation in his stare. “How’s Amira?”

“How’s Nate? Long hours you’ve been working lately.” He winks. I pick up his cup, turn sharply away and my trainers scrape abruptly on the gravel as I get him another coffee, and my own. When I come back out, he is hunched over the table, skimming his phone.

“So, come on. I asked first. You two seem pretty into each other.”

“Oh, all fine.” He shrugs lightly. “I finally got that travel commission I was after. Barcelona to Cádiz by train, eight-hundred miles across Spain starting next week, then down to Tarifa and a ferry trip to Tangier.”

“Sounds like a long trip. Maybe a good time for a break from Amira, given you’re going away for a while. It’s probably for the best, don’t you think?”

He squints at me, wounded, his chin juts out a little.

“Why are you so keen to split us up? I’m not going to hurt her. I’m actually hoping she’ll join me on the final leg of my Spanish trip.”

---