A cold couch

Though he is smiling when he enters, he brings an air of sadness in with him. The room feels still, more still than usual, as we start. I know that today is the day. We have spent months talking about today. He has had sleepless nights, nightmares, waking nightmares, about what today would hold and, as today approached, it became clear that his nightmares all were coming true.

He sits down on the black leather couch. Though soft, it’s not warm. I wish it were warmer for him. I wish it enveloped his body more, that there were nubs of fabric to press softly against him, to hold him, to grow warm with the heat of his body and to return the heat to him, rather than the cool leather that seems simply to sit beneath him. I feel a chill as cold air floats past me, moving from the window behind me to the center of the warmer room. I’m cold, and I’m sitting in a comfy chair whose soft material embraces my weight, holding a cushion to my side. He is relegated to this long, cold, dark, impermeable couch.

I think about couches, about the meaning and feeling of them, about how much they communicate, about how imperfectly they communicate. This is not my couch. But he doesn’t know this. Does he?

He stretches his legs out before him a bit and I notice something: he sits far back in the couch, so his legs dangle off the edge, his feet not quite reaching the ground. He’s not tall, but he’s not so short that I would expect his feet to dangle so. I often feel with him that I’m in the presence of a wounded child and not a 40-year-old man. Never do I feel this more than now.

As he opens his mouth, his words join the din of the buses passing by, the street conversations just feet from my drafty window, through which the smell of cigarette smoke faintly wafts in. His voice – quiet, gentle – rises above the sounds of the street, over the sound of the too-loud music from the waiting room. His voice is quiet, gentle. The sounds of life, so close, so loud, recede, and he tells me that his nightmare has come true.

He seems, somehow, easier, lighter than he has previously. His nightmare has come true, yes, and he dabs his eyes with tissues as he tells me this dream I’ve heard so many times now, but this time, for the first time, in the past tense, rather than the future. But he’s lighter. He is sadly smiling. The smile communicates his complicated truth: the nightmare is a nightmare, but there’s something in it that feels good and right and true about it. The world has, by his very nightmare, been made coherent to him somehow. His exterior reality now conforms with his inner reality, and he feels he must perform sadness for me – after all, there’s an entire box of tissues sitting on the cold glass table in front of him. But it is not, I’m surprised to see, sadness that he feels.

I know this by looking at his face, by seeing his smile. It’s not a sad smile. The tears aren’t tears of sadness. They’re tears of joy. And of mourning, too, to be sure – but a sweet, tender sadness much older, much younger, than I had realized previously. He is mourning not what happened today, but the moments of his childhood that made today feel so right.

I will defend him. Against himself. Against others. I am protective of him. I want to hold him. He has been called names – horrible names. By people who should know better and by people who have every right not to know better.

And, truth be told, from a certain angle, he looks like the monster people see in him, he sees in himself. But I can’t quite reach that angle, somehow. As I look at him from every angle I can reach, I just see this little boy, sitting far back on this cold, cold couch that he thinks is mine, but that I know is not, his feet dangling off the edge, as tears drip slowly down his stubbly cheeks.