This Close To Okay

by Leesa Cross-Smith

Shattered energy seemed to pulse from him like sonar. Tight blips of loneliness. Tallie translated the echolocation easily. She was lonesome and blipping, too.

She was only a bit surprised no one else stopped, no one else pulled to the side and said hey. Everyone always thought everyone else would take care of things.

but also believed in the power of simplicity: listening, a warm drink. Her clients opened up more when they were holding a steamy mug.

She knew making suicide harder for people who were considering it was sometimes the difference between life and death. She’d read about the suicide rate plummeting in Great Britain after something as simple as swapping the coal gas stoves for natural gas, because too often, suicide came down to a matter of convenience.

Had he confused exhaustion for hopelessness? Maybe they felt exactly the same in the cold rain, darkness creeping.

Depression was a vacuum that sucked out everything—leaving nothing behind except the burdening weight of nothingness.

So much of therapy was practicality and giving people a much-needed pass to relax when they needed to or be weird when they needed to. To free their minds from doing what they felt like they should be doing if it always went against what they wanted to do. To ask questions like why when the client had never considered it.

Even people without a history of mental illness had to go to great lengths to protect their mental health.

are you ok? Close.

After love, forgiveness is the strongest glue holding every family together.

“You have to do things when you have a chance to do them,”