i come clean
with chlorine in my hair
and a damp towel heart,
still wrung out
from pretending i’m fine.

she asks me
to hold my sadness
up to the light
like it’s a gemstone
i forgot i was wearing.

on a scale of one to ten—
(what if it’s an eight
but shaped like a childhood memory?)
i say “seven.”
i lie.
or maybe i don’t.

she asks me to measure it,
but how do you chart
a thunderstorm’s favorite room?
how do you scale
the hush of drowning?
still, i try.

she nods
like she understands.
and maybe she does.
or maybe she just knows
how to fold a pause
into something gentle.

she writes,
i wonder what part of me
she’s translating
into numbers,
into categories of deficits.

either way,
i press “leave meeting”
and stare at the screen
long after it goes black.
not sure if anything changed,
but at least
i showed up.