The thing with these kinds of journeys and these kinds of dreams is that the truck stops don’t change, the rest stops don’t change, the signs telling you that dangerous snakes and scorpions lie just beyond the entrance to a bathroom you’ve been waiting forty miles to get to don’t change, the roads littered with remnants of blown-out tires don’t change, the freight trains rattling beside you don’t change, the dust devils blowing high and wide in the fallow fields you drive by don’t change. The motel bars and empty motel pools don’t change. But each time you pass through, you have changed.

In my dream, I think I may have found a way to keep them alive. It’s when I wake up that I’m not so sure.

5.

Bethanny had gently manipulated us into performing our pain in our first session. In our second, a week later, she wanted to talk about how the exercise made us feel.

She had asked us to journal about it so we could remember being in the moment, while also journaling after we had some time to process. I’d bought a plain Moleskine for these sessions and had not yet gotten comfortable with doing anything more than a bullet-point list of my anguished embarrassment at performing vulnerability in front of other people. I knew my answers were angry and focused on the humiliation. I had underlined “emotional manipulation” twice. But I had finally started sleeping more than a couple hours a night again, so I decided to come back.

As people raised their hands to share, I looked around and did not see Andrew in the assembled group. I knew he wasn’t going to come back, but nobody seemed to be preoccupied by that but me.

As Nathan spoke, offering perfectly healthy pain-avoidance techniques—upping your serotonin, taking trips to the gym, having a good talk with a friend—I watched the room around me crumble. Women talked about their breakthroughs and started weeping again as men wiped the earnest beginnings of tears from their eyes. They had reached higher ground, had gone deeper into their tragedy, but Nathan had been stuck with me and my shitty avoidance techniques: the inability to feel anything, which I had been perfecting for over three decades. But I could tell he withheld from me, too. I wasn’t sure if he assumed I couldn’t take it, or if he hadn’t considered how performatively healthy his avoidance techniques were.

“I run” seemed to be loaded, like it could go another way. I run from people. I run from situations. Maybe I wanted him to be more fucked up than he was presenting himself to be.