Today she only cries.

The sound of it is almost loud enough to clot the silence between us.
It will be the first time I leave before her.

She is better today. And angrier.

Her certainty is still fluid, but it moves in single motions
and there is no ice in her body. Nothing so fragile or reflected.

She sits beside me, rather than across. The glass coffee table shows how close we are stalled.

"It's been a long time."

"I was away. I had to go away."

She laughs, and there is something specific in it, something she will not give. She speaks again, "I can lie  now. It means I am less confused.

There are true and untrue things again." Her eyes rip into my face.

"Do you lie to me? To others?" I am allowed to match her when she is cruel.

"Why would I lie to you?
But yes, sometimes to others."

"About your depression."

"No. Never."

She is quite still all the way through the interview. Her body temperature is low.

Today she comes to me. Early, when the moon is blending into lighter sky. She doesn't look me in the eye when I open the door but side to side instead. I don't know if she sees the bicycles or milk bottles when she does it, or whether the view is taken up entirely by not seeing me.

"Is everything - " She cuts me off there.

"I want to talk to you." There is a hesitation - she flushes.

I don't say anything but let her gather herself.

"It's - there's a - this thing called a smiling self, it - can I come in?" Her sleeve is deforming as she clutches the cuff in her fingers and pushes out her elbow.

We go in. There's tea.

"Because - when you are ... bad. You don't feel your emotions properly." She talks up and down, and her words constantly threaten to run out of breath, "So smiling, putting the smiling self in ... because you perform feeling, the performance, the smiling separates you even further from the emotions underlying the depression. You forget that some part of you is angry or hurt, in a dislocated, under appreciated way, and then you begin to become confused. You think that if you are smiling, and you cannot feel the grief, then you are not depressed. Or if you win some real laughter then this invalidates your baseline. It's confusing, and damaging."

"When I am anxious."

She stops and rearranges her foot so that she can hold it with both hands.

"When. My heart beats very hard."

I nod warmly, feeling that I can understand, "Trying to beat its way out?"

She stares at me and sort of smiles. I think she meant for me to say that to her.

"No. The beat gets louder and tries to pull my body in, like my pulse has gravity." She makes a fist around her toes, "I would like to draw a picture where an embryo develops heart first." Her ankle rotates, the bones sharp even though she has gained weight again, "Not sentimentally."

We wait together for twenty minutes after that. I know her better, and I can know when she wants me to ask her questions - I should be more careful I'm told. With her or myself? No one has said.

She does not draw anything, but falls asleep instead. Waking and unmaking steadily.

And today?

"Exhausted. Whatever it was that kept - that kept - "

Her breathing shorts and she sits low in the knuckles of her shoulders.
It is hard seeing her without her pride.

She whistles out a breath and a smile flinches in and out of her face. Like a bird trying to settle on soft ground.

"I have been eating my tail. It makes me feel sick."

She make an aborted gestures and scratches hard at the skin above her elbow, under her sleeve.

“Do you remember the metaphors?”

She shifts. The movements are precise in a way that suggests loneliness. She is not used to her time being taken up.

“No.”

“Why not? Weren’t they important to you?”

“Not really. I only built them because the terms they used were so useless.”

“Depression?”

“Mm.” 

I want to ask you who your they are but ...

Perhaps that is the wrong question.

She nods in the rhythm of my thoughts.