The Divide

A stranger who I’ve seen every week for 4 years sits across from me.

Are you a metre away or a million miles?

Lucie (22)

K read this in our parts book today and she said ‘I’m here. I am here all the time. I am the same as ever. So the distance is not with me. The distance is with Lucie and adult CB and everyone feeling separate. So it feels like for you maybe there is a glass wall here, but actually for me there isn’t, there’s no divide. For me it’s the same as always.’

And it hurts so much. It has been 5 weeks since we could reach K. It is making everything else feel so unmanageable. The pain of not being able to connect and then being shoved back outside into the cold and wet and left with this gnawing aching pain getting bigger and bigger as it sinks in that  it is a whole week till we get the chance to try and connect again is so completely awful. It is so hard to sit with this pain and not do desperate things to squash it. And K replied to a text this evening but I don’t want to be like this again. For so long texting her didn’t occur to me. I want to be back there again. I felt so secure in our relationship. I am scared she will get tired of being back where we were. Are we back where we were? Does she notice we are not in combat this time?

For so long therapy was ‘something I did’ – important, but not all-consuming. So beautiful after all those months of years and turmoil. I was more stable then I ever had been. K was in the background and I rarely thought of her because I knew she was there and I knew my space was there waiting for me every week. I want that back. It was so safe and lovely and I was soaking her in and enjoying the healing and now I can’t feel it. I feel so lost and untethered. Keeping going is so hard. I’m starting to doubt whether all those months of feeling so held and safe and self-contained every really happened.

Why did she have to move house? And how can that have disrupted everything so much? Has it? Or am I making this up? I feel so lost and alone.