It’s impossible to describe that kind of pain.

Yet here I am, trying.

You remember the first time someone broke up with you? The feeling when you first realized what they were about to say — as if you’d thought you were standing on a rock-solid foundation, on a granite boulder, only to look down and see it crumbling under your feet? — you hear them start to explain that they don’t really want to do this, that it isn’t about you…and the stone turns to dust under you. The space that had been filled with dense, definite substance is becoming just…space.

Instead of standing on anything solid you are Wile E. Coyote in that instant he realizes the cliff is next to him, and under him is only air.

My therapist had been through so much, I understood what she was saying; her daughter needed her, I’d violated our agreement not to try to kill myself, yada yada. And yet I hadn’t seen it coming and had no idea she was going to do what I now saw she was doing.

The pain surprised me. In retrospect, I understand; the tiny child inside who’d realized far too early that she couldn’t count on the one human she should have been able to depend on had never forgotten the loss of certainty in her mother. That little girl had learned far too young what it felt like to have love and comfort ripped away without warning. And that little girl never stopped hurting.

In that moment, Roz had gotten up to leave the room — get tea? Water? A Kleenex? I don’t remember now — but she was out of the room when I let myself curl up into a ball on the couch, bent double by a knife piercing my bowels. The level and immediacy of the pain came out of nowhere; honestly, even now I’ll say I wouldn’t have thought it would hit me like that. But I can feel it as if it were fresh. An unvoiced howl ripped through me. My mouth opened to try to let it escape, but nothing came out. I stopped breathing.

At the same time, the adult in me — had she emerged then, as a small child? Had I known even as a toddler how to protect my innermost self? — said “don’t let her see you in pain. Hide it. Now.” And before Roz could come back into the room, I straightened up. Inhaled. Exhaled. Calmed my face.

I still don’t know whether she saw what had happened. Whether when she came back into the room my face was as calm as I tried to make it, or there were still traces of that engulfing pain written there. Later, and still, I wondered whether she had cameras in her therapy room, whether she went back and saw what happened when she’d been gone for a minute. Because it was that fast: the pain zapped me, doubled me over, took my breath, and the protective interior adult stepped in to protect me within seconds.

Sometimes I’m glad I don’t remember much of my childhood. These kinds of episodes tell me there are memories there I don’t need to recall.