Session 4:

I stared at the invitation on my desk, its gold-embossed letters gleaming mockingly under the desk lamp. A wedding. An elaborate affair, no doubt. The kind where everyone pretended to care, their laughter too loud, their smiles too wide. The kind of event where I always felt out of place.

My mother had insisted I attend. “It’s family,” she’d said, as if blood ties were reason enough to subject myself to a room full of judgmental stares and probing questions. But I didn’t go. I couldn’t.

Not because of the people I hated. I’d long learned to ignore their snide remarks and unsolicited advice. No, it was because of the one person who wouldn’t be there.

Her.

She wasn’t family. Not in the traditional sense. But she was more than that. She was the thread that tied my fragmented world together. Her voice, her laughter, the way she could turn the most mundane detail into a story worth hearing—it was her absence that made gatherings like these unbearable.

The morning after the wedding, she called.

“How was the function?” she asked, her voice soft, like a melody I hadn’t heard in years but still remembered every note of.

“I didn’t go,” I replied.

“Why not?”

“There were people I hate,” I said bluntly, then paused before adding, “and none I love.”

Her silence on the other end was heavy, filled with the kind of understanding that only she could offer.

“You could have gone anyway,” she said finally. “Not everyone there was a stranger.”

“No,” I said, my voice quieter now, almost a whisper. “But you weren’t there.”

Her sigh was barely audible, but I felt it. “You know I can’t always be everywhere you want me to be,” she said, her tone tinged with something I couldn’t place. Regret? Guilt?

“I know,” I murmured, the words more for myself than for her.

The conversation drifted into safer waters after that. She told me about her week—a new project, a book she’d started, the way the sunset painted her balcony in hues of orange and pink. I listened, letting her words fill the void, even as they deepened it.

When the call ended, I stared at the unopened invitation again. My mother had called me selfish for skipping the wedding, accused me of being too wrapped up in my own world. Maybe she was right. But what was the point of being there if the only person who made the noise bearable wasn’t?

I thought back to the psychologist’s office, to the questions she’d asked. Why do you isolate yourself? Why do you find it so hard to connect?

I didn’t have an answer then, and I didn’t have one now. All I knew was that her absence left a void that no crowded room could fill.

The truth was, I didn’t hate weddings. I hated being reminded of what I didn’t have.

And her? She made everything feel like home. But she wasn’t there. She was never there when it mattered most.

I folded the invitation neatly and placed it in a drawer, shutting it away along with the questions I didn’t want to answer.

The psychologist’s voice echoed in my mind: “You still can’t remember her face, can you?”

No, I couldn’t.

But I remembered her laugh. The way she said my name. The way her absence turned social gatherings into lonely affairs.

And maybe that was enough. Or maybe it wasn’t.

I didn’t know anymore.