Voss’s Vulnerability

The window is open a crack, just enough for the city’s breath to seep inside—warm, sour with rotting trash and the iron tang of the subway grates below. I press my palm to the glass, half expecting it to ripple like ink. It doesn’t. Nothing does anymore. Even the air feels stiff, overworked, like it’s forgotten how to move naturally.

Dr. Voss sits at his desk, back to me, eating alone again.

There’s something ritualistic in the way he lifts the fork, the way he chews slowly, like he’s not tasting, just proving he can. A paper plate on a stack of journals. Cold cuts. A pickle, half-eaten, glistening under the jaundiced office lamp. He doesn’t read while he eats. Doesn’t listen to the radio. Just sits, facing the wall of glass that separates his office from the corridor, where I stand in the shadow.

I’ve been watching him like this for weeks.

Not as a patient. Not even as a prisoner. As an observer. A poet.

He thinks I don’t know he keeps a copy of every poem I’ve ever written. Thinks I don’t realize his office has no family photos, no diplomas, only a faded postcard of some unnamed lake pinned behind his chair. Thinks I don’t see the way his fingers tremble when he turns the page of my journal—like he’s afraid the ink might bleed into him.

Tonight, the door is unlocked.

I step inside.

He doesn’t start. Doesn’t turn. Just sets the fork down with quiet precision.

“You’re awake,” he says. His voice sits low in the room, like stones in water.

“It’s not sleep that holds me,” I say. “It’s the shape of everything. It’s like—when you look at a word too long, and it stops being a word. Starts being just lines. That’s what the world feels like now. Lines without meaning.”

He turns. His face is gaunt, the skin pulled tight over the bones of his cheeks. His eyes—gray, glassy, clinical—don’t flare with alarm. Just settle on me with that familiar weight. Assessment. Measurement. But something else flickers beneath it. Something tired.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says. Not firm. Almost gentle.

“I know where I’m supposed to be,” I say. “And I’ve been there. For eight years. I’ve been the good patient. The quiet girl. The case study with promising linguistic deviations.” I pause. “But tonight, you’re eating alone again. And I wonder—do you write in the margins of your own life? Do you cross out your mistakes?”

He doesn’t answer. Picks up his glass of water. Takes a sip. Avoids my gaze.

“I used to think you were the warden,” I say, stepping closer. “That you held the keys to reality. That your diagnosis was the law of physics.” My voice is soft. Almost singing. “But you don’t live in the world either, do you? You just document it. You save scraps of other people’s madness like they’re relics. Like they might save you.”

He puts the glass down. Too hard. A bead of water trembles at the rim.

“I’m here to help you, Sarah.”

“Are you?” I tilt my head. “Or are you here because I’m the only person who writes back? The only one whose words you can’t predict? You change my meds, you adjust my schedule, you pull apart my metaphors—but you never delete a line. You keep them all. Why?”

He looks at me then. Really looks. And for the first time, I don’t see the doctor. I see a man in a too-tight suit, eating cold meat in a room that smells like antiseptic and regret. A man with no one waiting for him.

“Who do you write for, Dr. Voss?” I ask. “Not your papers. Not your colleagues. But the truth, under the truth. Who hears you?”

Silence.

The hum of the fluorescent light. The distant click of a gurney down the hall. Julian probably. Making his rounds. His sketchbook tucked under his arm. The only man who’s ever looked at me like I’m real, even when I’m not.

Voss exhales. Slow. Shaken. “I don’t write,” he says. “I observe.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he says, softer. “It isn’t.”

He looks down at the journal open on his desk. My last poem. Two pages of crumbling couplets about a bookstore that never existed, a woman who kissed like smoke and smelled like rain. Mira. My love. My ghost. My lie.

“You gave her eyes,” he says suddenly. “In the third stanza. You said they were the color of subway tokens after rain. I’ve never seen them that way. But tonight, I looked. Held one under the tap. And for a second—I thought I saw what you meant.”

I don’t move. My breath catches, not from pain, but from the unbearable softness of it. The admission.

“You’re not correcting it,” I whisper.

“No.”

“You’re keeping it.”

“Yes.”

Another silence. But different now. Not empty. Full of something unnamed.

“I used to think your delusions were a sickness,” he says. “Now I wonder if they’re a kind of sight. And maybe—maybe the sickness is not seeing anything at all.”

I step forward. Lean my hands on the edge of his desk. Our reflections swim in the dark window behind him—herself and himself, blurred at the edges, almost merging.

“So who do I write for?” I ask. “If not you?”

He doesn’t answer right away. Then, so quiet I almost miss it:

“You do. And that’s what terrifies me.”

His hand brushes the edge of my journal. Not to close it. Just to touch it. Like it’s sacred.

And in that moment, the power shifts. Not with a shout, not with a rebellion. With stillness.

I am not the patient.

I am the poet.

And he—this man with his neat desk and sharper scalpels—is the one unraveling.

I turn to leave. The door creaks.

“Sarah,” he says, without looking up.

I pause.

“Don’t stop writing.”

I don’t say I won’t. I don’t say I can’t.

I just close the door behind me.

And somewhere, deep in the marrow of the building, a single word begins to form behind my eyes—soft, dark, inevitable—like a seed cracking open in ash.