new morning routine

[Spoken aloud]

I feel less sentimental now. I am franker and more exposed. I thought all year about love. Then I thought about friendship. Now I think about encounters. I think about the way I tried, for years, to guard anyone from seeing me as fragile or naïve. How I mostly succeeded. How privately depressing it was to succeed. It is difficult to keep the presentation of a self discreet from the feeling of a self. In therapy, I keep using the second person, as if there is someone else here. As if there is someone else there, I speak aloud in my room. I speak aloud in my room to hear my own voice. “Just to hear your own voice,” as if that is an insult. If that is an insult, then I have not succeeded. And if I have not succeeded, then, to you, I am fragile and naïve. And, yes, it is to you I speak. You who is here, who I saw in other people, who is in there in the room, who is waiting for me.