She told me what the Tuesday session had contained: a detailed account of the two years preceding the appointment, in which I had apparently described a version of my life in which a secondary self — not dissociated, not absent, but quieter — managed the functional demands of my days while I was focused elsewhere. I had called it the gap because the gap was where it lived. I had described going to the supermarket and finding the correct things in my bag afterward. Making phone calls I had no memory of initiating. Sending emails that were exactly right for the situation but that I had not consciously composed.
I had gone to therapy, she said, because I had become aware that the gap was getting larger. Not threatening, not distressing — but larger. And I wanted to understand whether what I was experiencing was something to be managed, or something to be listened to.
She paused there, in the way she paused when she was waiting to see if I would pick up a thread.
“Which do you think it is?” I asked.
“What do you think?” she said.
I have been seeing Dr. Heller for four months now. My memory of the sessions is imperfect — I cannot always tell you, afterward, whether I remember being there or simply infer it from the notes I make immediately after. But I have started to notice the gap differently. Not as a missing stretch, not as an absence, but as a presence that occupies the part of the day I have not fully inhabited.
The copy editor who meets a deadline while I am somewhere else. The person who chose the chair by the window. The one who went to therapy before I knew I needed to go.
Dr. Heller says the question is not whether to integrate the gap — that word implies a division that may not be accurate. The question is whether to be present for it. Whether to stop experiencing my own life as something that happens slightly ahead of me and then becomes available in memory.
I do not have an answer to that yet. I am not sure the gap does either.
But I have started writing things down immediately when they happen — not to catch the missing pieces, but to practice being inside the moment long enough to have something to record.
Yesterday I made coffee and I remember doing it. The weight of the mug, the sound of the water, the particular light through the kitchen window at eight in the morning.
That sounds like nothing. It did not feel like nothing. I am starting there.
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