That gives me the summer.

Dr. Pellegrini said it gentle, the way you tell a dog it can't come inside. She said I had developed what she called a "termination resistance pattern," which is the kind of phrase that makes you feel both diagnosed and insulted at the same time. I wrote it down. I appreciated the specificity.

That was eleven months ago. I still have the notepad.

I want to be clear that I have not been showing up to her office. I am not a person who shows up where he is not welcome. I have some dignity. What I have been doing is continuing to process, which is a thing she herself told me to do, and which does not have a listed end date that I can find in any of the literature.

I process by writing. I write her letters I don't send, which was also her suggestion, and I feel that deserves some acknowledgment. She gave me the tool. I am using the tool. If the letters have gotten longer, that is simply evidence of growth. The one from March was fourteen pages but it had an index, which shows organization, which is the opposite of whatever she thought she was treating.

My wife says I need a new therapist. My wife says a lot of things I write down and revisit later. She is not wrong, technically, but she is also someone who threw out a cast-iron skillet in 1987 because it had "a rust spot," so her relationship with letting go is not above examination either.

The thing nobody tells you about therapy ending is that it ends at the therapist's discretion, not yours, which seems like a structural problem nobody in the field wants to discuss. You spend years learning to be vulnerable and then the person you practiced on graduates you whether you feel graduated or not. Dr. Pellegrini called it "a healthy termination." I looked that up too. Healthy termination is a real term. So is "incomplete grief," and I am not saying those two things are related, I am just saying I looked them up on the same afternoon.

I did try one other therapist. His name was Todd, which I did not hold against him, but he wanted to talk about my childhood in the first session, which felt presumptuous. I have already talked about my childhood. It is processed. I told him I was more interested in working on present-tense concerns and he said, in this particular tone, that he thought my present-tense concerns might have roots, and I said that I thought his intake form had a lot of typos, and we did not schedule a second session.

I think about Dr. Pellegrini sometimes when I'm on the porch. Not in a way that requires intervention. Just the way you think about anyone who knew you when you were worse and didn't mention it more than necessary. She had a ficus in her office that always looked like it was barely making it, and I used to root for it every week, and I genuinely do not know if it is still alive, and that is a grief I have nowhere to put.

She would have had something to say about that.

I have an appointment penciled in to talk to someone new. September. That gives me the summer.