Nefeli says the thing I am walking around. She has always done this. It is the most uncomfortable kind of friendship and the only kind I trust.
We were drinking tea and I was telling her, lightly, the way you report the weather, that I had been tired lately, that I didn’t feel much, that it was probably normal, that Leo was patient. I had the whole arrangement laid out — tired, normal, patient — like cutlery I had polished. Nefeli looked at me over her cup and said, “You’re not tired. You’ve just never been told that any of it is yours.”
I wanted to argue. I am good at the tired explanation; I have used it for years and it has never failed me. “I’m tired” closes a door so gently that no one, including me, notices it has been closed. “I don’t feel anything for him tonight” — I have said that to myself like a verdict, when I think now it was only ever a question I was too unpracticed to ask properly.
Nefeli is not gentle about this, which is why it works. She said that the women she knows who feel nothing are almost never women with nothing in them. They are women who learned early that wanting was a way to be caught out, so they set it down somewhere safe and then forgot the address. The not-feeling is not empty. It is something kept very carefully out of reach.
I did not like hearing it. I drove home turning it over the way you turn over a sentence someone said years ago that suddenly makes sense. All my reasons — the tiredness, the no-feeling, the it’s-just-how-I-am — lined up in a row, and for the first time I saw them not as facts about me but as a set of very good locks I had installed myself, on a door I had simply stopped trying.
I am not going to pretend one conversation changed me. It didn’t. I am still tired. I still don’t always know what I want, or whether I want it for myself or for the version of me that performs. But Nefeli put a small crack in the word “normal,” and through the crack I could see that the woman who feels nothing and the woman with too much kept carefully out of reach might be the same woman.
She might be me. I am not ready to say more than might. But I noticed, driving home, that I was not tired at all. I was thinking. And thinking, it turns out, is not nothing. It was the first thing in a long time that belonged entirely to me.