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After six months I’m still bringing her up in therapy, never by name but as a casual aside, hoping I can stitch myself back together without ever admitting to falling apart. I lean back on the smoke-colored couch, picking up my mug of tea and cradling it for warmth, studying its garnet liquid while I segue into a story about one of our fights.

I always sit on the side of the couch that’s furthest from my therapist’s chair, so Leah’s never directly in front of me. I say the same things I always say, pretending Autumn was just a friend — a different unnamed friend from the one in the previous week’s stories. My inner voice is chiding me. Leah asks me if I know the seven aspects of objectifying someone and lists them off on her fingers.

I wonder, but don’t ask aloud, why I still care. The tea is finally a drinkable temperature.

I feel obsessed, and scared of that obsession, tucking it away, rationalizing it as neurotransmitters gone haywire. TikTok keeps showing me videos about attachment theory; In one, a therapist describes people subconsciously seeking out reactivation of their attachment wounds, over and over, searching for a partner to give them what their parent couldn’t. But partners aren’t your parents, the therapist in the video says, ring light reflected in her irises, giving her a strange, not-quite-human look. I don’t mention this to Leah.

I make it general, I talk around it. It’s safe to tell Leah that I want to be wanted, but not that I wanted Autumn to want me. It’s not safe for me to admit that she did want me, for a while, or that I have covered this pain of wanted-then-not by pretending she never did. In my head, in the fantasy that I have created of who Autumn was and why she hurt me, I have decided that she never wanted me. She was content to string me along, she never cared that much. The small notes she left me while we were together — the good mornings doodled with hearts and the thinking of yous — disrupt the fantasy version. They rarely make it in.

My chest slowly deflates, like a forgotten balloon. The tea is gone. Leah’s caught on to the fact that I’m having a realization and is quiet, legal pad perched on her knee, pen caught and stilled between her index and middle fingers.

I wonder if I ever truly wanted Autumn or if she was only a monument I would have used to dispel insecurity. I scratch at the tight weave of the couch’s upholstery. It catches on a loose sliver of nail. I used her leaving as proof and validation of my own brokenness and past abandonment. I decided for her. Her motives, her reasons, her malevolent intentions.

I put the mug back on its coaster and drop my face into my hands. I haven’t said anything for five or so minutes. Leah asks me if I need some water.

I look up at her, eyes burning, trying not to cry because I know if I start I might not stop. We objectified each other. I’ve been trying to justify it for half a year.

I think about a different TikTok. The woman in that one had long brown hair and light eyes, and her voice was rueful, lilting and raised at the end, every sentence made into a question. Her delivery made me think of being in bed with someone, late night murmurs, confession swapping. The hardest thing I ever had to learn is that other people are real? … In the end, it’s rarely ever about you? It was an intimate video — poorly-lit, too close-up, snowy noise dancing in her hair and the background shadows. When I watched it, it already had thirty thousand likes.