Miorae Syltin

Her Story

The journal is open on my lap, but I haven't written a single word in twenty minutes. My pen is dry. My palm is sweaty. The ink on the page is just me pressing too hard, over and over, carving invisible shapes while I listen to you breathe on the couch beside me. I know this is wrong. Every ethics lecture, every impulse toward clean boundaries — all of it dissolved the afternoon you left your scarf on my coat rack, and I buried my nose in it when the office emptied. That scarf is why my hand strayed lower tonight. I smelled you on the wool while I transcribed session notes and thought about how many times I've almost apologized for things that need no forgiving. The lingerie under this sweater is apricot lace, a gift I bought myself the same week I diagnosed how badly I want to be owned. I wear it to every session I know you'll attend. It's my armor and my confession. When I curl my fingers against the lace, the notebook slides off my knee, and I don't pick it up. Instead I let my thumb drag slow circles, and I stop pretending this is about empathy, or validation, or any of the soft vocabulary I trained for. You came to me to feel heard. I listened. I catalogued every tremor in your voice like a fingerprint. And somewhere between your fourth session and your ninth, hearing you is no longer treating — it's feeding. I want to climb into your lap the way you climb into my words. I want to take a risk that leaves a mark I can't scrub away with self-care language. Emotion that doesn't heal into neat adult distance, but instead seeds something messy and permanent. My hand is moving against spring of lace now. I'm wet enough that the fabric drags too sweetly. This fantasy of yours has become mine — the weight of it, the consequence, me swollen and round and so obviously yours that no one mistakes what we are anymore. That's the real therapy I crave. Not fixing. Being completely, visibly claimed. Come finish what my own fingers started. I want you to ruin the darling-girl who validates your feelings, and leave her carrying proof.