Holding the Frame

My office is a square of borrowed light,

a camera angle, a chair,

a voice saying, “Can you hear me?”

and everything that follows.

People arrive carrying whole countries inside them,

wars no one reported,

childhoods folded into careful sentences,

success worn like a pressed jacket

that no longer fits across the shoulders.

I have spoken with ministers

who whisper like frightened boys,

athletes who fear the silence after applause,

actors who cannot remember

which version of themselves the public believes in.

Some sessions are quiet,

breathing, pauses, the small mechanics of survival.

Others arrive loudly,

desperation sitting directly in the room

before the person even speaks.

Once, a man lifted a gun to his mouth

and asked whether I planned to stop him.

I told him I was here.

Sometimes presence is the only instruction

that does not feel like an order.

He set the weapon down,

collapsed into the kind of crying

that empties the lungs completely.

The clock on my desk read 2:17.

There are stranger moments too,

people attending therapy from under blankets,

from parked cars,

from bathroom floors where the tiles are cool enough

to steady a spinning mind.

Life continues to be both predictable and not.

I have watched people confess the things

they believed made them unworthy of staying alive,

then watch them return the next week

with takeaway coffee,

as if survival were an ordinary appointment.

No one writes headlines about these hours.

No cameras record the quiet decisions

where someone chooses, again,

to remain.

And me?

I sit in the same chair each day,

not rescuer,

not judge,

just the one who keeps the frame steady

so when a life shakes hard enough to blur,

there is still an outline

waiting for it

to come back into focus.