I Needed You Alive

This is the most honest thing Jacob manages to say all night: he wanted not suffering — he wanted to decide. When it hurts, how much, when it is enough. And then the cliff edge: “Needed me for what?” — “He did not know. Or did not know how to turn the knowledge into words.” The feeling exists; the language for it does not — no one ever taught him that language.

Simon hears only ownership in the confession — and he is right and wrong at once. “I needed you alive” is attachment in the only grammar Jacob ever had: the grammar of possession. The tragedy of this pair is that both felt a great deal and could name it only with pain. The words missing here are exactly the ones therapy teaches.