The Anatomy of Letting Go

Dr. Clara Voss kept a jar of dried lavender on her desk. Not for the scent—it had faded years ago—but for the ritual of crumbling a bud between her fingers during sessions, a tactile reminder to stay here, stay here, stay here. Her patients mistook it for calm. They didn’t know it was a metronome for the panic she swallowed like bad wine.

Her specialty was grief, though she’d never named it that. Existential recalibration, she called it in her journal, between entries about her brother’s old voicemails—saved, deleted, salvaged from the trash folder, saved again—and the way her hands still reached for her ex-wife’s hip in empty beds.

Then came Eli.

A sculptor, he arrived with clay under his nails and a tremor in his voice. “I keep making her,” he said. “Over and over. Her nose. Her collarbone. But the second I finish… I smash it.”

Clara didn’t write notes. She crumbled lavender. “Why?”

“Because it’s not her,” he whispered. “It’s just… dirt.”

That night, Clara dreamt of her brother’s laugh—a sound she’d grafted onto strangers in grocery lines—and woke with her arms around a pillow, the fabric damp and cold.


Eli returned weekly. He brought photos of his sculptures: a woman mid-turn, hair frozen in motion; hands cupped like a promise; a hollow chest cavity filled with glass shards. “I tried to make her heart,” he said. “But it looked like a wound.”

Clara’s lavender jar emptied. She began stealing petals from the clinic’s courtyard, their purple too bright, too alive.

“Do you ever worry,” Eli asked, “that caring too much is just… postponing the inevitable?”

The question lodged in her ribs. That night, she texted her ex-wife’s old number: The heater’s broken. Remember how you’d warm my hands?

No reply. (There never was.)


Clara started slipping.

She forgot to mute her phone. A patient’s ringtone—her brother’s favorite song—sent her vomiting in the staff bathroom. She bought a wool coat two sizes too big, just to feel the weight of someone else’s skin. She let Eli see her cry.

“You’re not okay,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re a lighthouse,” he replied. “All that light, but you’re drowning in your own basement.”


Eli’s final sculpture was a self-portrait: his face half-eroded, one eye sealed shut, the other wide and wet. “I’m done,” he said. “I can’t keep digging her out of the ground.”

Clara handed him the lavender jar. “Take this. It’s empty, but… sometimes holding nothing is the point.”

He left. She locked her office, pressed her forehead to the floor, and let the silence scream.


Clara sits in her car outside her brother’s old apartment. The jar rattles in the passenger seat. Her phone buzzes—New patient: 8 a.m., compulsive guilt—but she turns it off.

The wool coat is heavy.
The heater’s still broken.

She crumbles a lavender bud that isn’t there.

Stay here. Stay here. Stay here.