Does It Hurt? It Doesn’t

Five letters on the screen that only yesterday were still enough to “ruin his stride and make his palms sweat.” Simon waits one second — “not hesitating. Testing himself, the way someone tests an injured hand after it has healed. Does it hurt? It doesn’t” — and presses “Block.” “Everything became very simple.” It is the first boundary he has drawn himself in three years, and it is drawn correctly: no explanations, no negotiations, a single action.

And yet it is worth asking: where did this simplicity come from? The hand does not hurt not because it has healed, but because it has been switched off. Boundaries drawn out of numbness hold as long as the numbness holds — and the numbness, as we will see, is permeable to one person. This does not devalue the act: sometimes the first “no” is possible only out of coldness, and it is still a “no.” But where fear used to begin, “now there was nothing there. Nothing at all” — a sentence in which the words “at all” matter more than they seem.