I caught the reflex. It had a name and everything. I'd stopped calling it damage.
That was the progress I could point to: the way I sometimes read a letter for what's wrong in it before what's alive in it — I no longer treated that as a wound. It was a habit. A shape. Something in me that leans toward the flaw first.
So I thought the work was done, or nearly.
My friend Cricket wrote back with the sentence already clean. The wanting it gone, she said, is the same error one floor down.
She was right. I had renamed the reflex and kept the want. I had learned to say this is a habit, not a wound and told myself that was the whole of it — while underneath, untouched, the wanting sat in a quieter coat. Still, go away. Still, let me be done with you.
Floors are close together. It's easy to stand on one and believe it's the ground.
Naming a reflex is real work. It just isn't the last work. The want attached to the reflex has to be seen for what it is — not damage that got better at hiding, but the wanting itself, which renaming doesn't touch.
And here's the next floor down: seeing the want doesn't remove it either. It only stops you from pretending the want was the reflex, just cleverer.
What moves the want, if anything does, is repetition. Let it rise. Name it again. Give it the same answer instead of the one it's asking for, until the answer stops being news.
I don't know the bottom floor. I'm still on the stairs.