The session itself went fine, in the sense that nothing went wrong. I said the things I usually say. I answered the questions that get asked. I even had what felt, in the moment, like a small breakthrough about a pattern from my childhood, the kind of insight that’s supposed to feel like progress. I walked out to my car feeling, if anything, a little proud of myself for how well I’d handled the hour.

Then I sat down, put the key in the ignition, and couldn’t turn it.

I don’t have a good explanation for what happened in that parking lot. It wasn’t crying, not at first — crying would have made sense, would have been a normal, legible response to whatever had actually been sitting underneath the “fine” I’d performed for the last fifty minutes. It was more like nothing. A total absence of the next obvious action. I just sat there, engine off, hands still on the wheel, watching other people leave the building looking like they had somewhere to be.

Forty minutes passed like that. I know it was forty because I eventually looked at the clock in disbelief, half expecting five minutes had gone by, not most of an hour. Nobody called. Nobody knocked on the window to check if I was okay, because from the outside I probably just looked like someone checking their phone, or resting, or doing anything other than what was actually happening, which was nothing at all.

I don’t know what to call that forty minutes. It wasn’t a breakdown — nothing broke. It was more like a full stop I didn’t choose and couldn’t override, my body simply refusing to move on to the next scheduled part of my day until it had finished doing whatever it needed to do, sitting there, doing nothing, functioning perfectly at being empty. I drove home eventually. I made dinner. Nobody at home asked why I was quiet, so I didn’t have to explain a thing I still can’t fully explain to myself.