The Last Chair

Every evening, after the house goes quiet, I return the chairs to their places.

It doesn’t matter how late the session ends, or whether the power’s been out, or whether my body has already started bargaining with sleep. The chairs must go back. Two of them, mostly. Sometimes three. Occasionally more, depending on the day and the stories it brought with it.

I don’t do this in the consulting room anymore. I learned quickly that rituals exposed too clearly stop working. Now the chairs live in my lounge room, identical except for the way they seem to remember weight. I don’t stack them. I place them.

One here.

One there.

Always the same distance apart.

I straighten the legs, run my hand along the backs, check the angles as if alignment might change what passed between them earlier. It never does. But the checking is part of it.

This is not something they teach you in training. There is no unit on what to do with other people’s insides once they’ve been opened and left behind. No lecture on how love, when filtered through distress, becomes something sticky and difficult to remove.

I see some strange people.

Not strange in the way the word usually means, not theatrical, not dramatic. Strange, in a quiet way. The kind of strangeness that lives in pauses, in what is said too carefully, in what is never said at all.

Some bring me their marriages. Some bring me their children. Some bring me the version of themselves that only exists when the door is closed and someone finally asks the right question.

A man once told me he loved his wife most when she was asleep, because she couldn’t contradict the version of her he needed. A woman described her grief as a cupboard she kept opening even though she already knew what was missing. A teenager explained, very calmly, how rage felt safer than hope.

I put them in the chairs.

I always do.

The ritual started years ago, after a session that refused to end even when the clock said it had. A couple sat where they always sat, angled just enough toward each other to look cooperative without touching. They spoke with the politeness of people who had already said the worst things.

When they left, something stayed.

I didn’t notice it immediately. I made tea. Fed the animals. Answered a message from my son. Laughed at something ordinary. But when I came back into the room, the chairs felt… occupied. Not haunted, that word is too dramatic. More like warm after someone stands up.

That night, I moved them. Carefully. As if someone fragile were still sitting there.

I slept better than I had in weeks.

So I did it again the next night. And the next.

Now it is part of how I love.

Because that’s what this is, even if it sounds wrong when said out loud. Love, stretched thin through repetition. Love, translated into behaviour. Love, expressed not toward one person, but toward the space between people. The space that so often injures them.

Some nights, the ritual is simple. Two chairs. A breath. Done.

Other nights, it grows.

If someone came close to collapsing, I would add a third chair. Not to sit in, no never that, but to acknowledge the weight that hovered nearby. Trauma has a way of standing just out of view, arms crossed, waiting to be noticed.

If a child was discussed, especially a child who had learned too early how to disappear, I would lower one chair slightly, tipping it back onto two legs for just a moment before settling it again. This part is dangerous. You have to know when to stop.

I am a mother. A grandmother. I know what it costs to lean too far.

Animals help. They always do. The dog watches from the doorway, head tilted, as if counting with me. The puppy sometimes sits in the wrong chair, which I allow. Animals understand boundaries better than most adults. They leave when they’ve had enough.

People don’t.

There are some minds I cannot make sense of, no matter how carefully I arrange things. They resist order. They leak. They cling. For those, the ritual does not resolve. It only contains.

I used to believe that was a failure.

Now I think containment is its own kind of intimacy.

Once, late at night, my partner asked what I was doing. He stood behind me, barefoot, watching as I adjusted a chair by half an inch.

“Work,” I said.

He laughed softly. Not unkindly. “You’re not at work.”

I wanted to tell him that this was the work. That love, when you do it properly, does not clock off. That connection repeats itself whether you consent or not. But I didn’t. Some explanations collapse under their own weight.

Instead, I kissed him. I finished the ritual. I turned off the light.

In the dark, the chairs remained.

That’s the unsettling part, I suppose. Not that I do this. But that I cannot say with certainty what it costs me. Or what it feeds. Or whether, one day, I will sit in one of those chairs myself and forget how to stand back up.

For now, the ritual persists.

Tomorrow, people will arrive. They will speak of love as if it is something that happened to them, rather than something they practice. I will listen. I will hold. I will guide.

And later, when the house is quiet again, I will return the chairs to their places.

Because connection always leaves a shape behind.