Not quiet the way a house is quiet after everyone leaves. Quiet the way a room is when someone is genuinely waiting for the rest of your sentence.
You know things about yourself that you have never said out loud. Pieces of them, maybe, to the right person on a good day, but never the whole thing from start to finish with nothing interrupting. They surface at strange hours, in the car, in the middle of saying something else entirely, and then the day takes them.
You are not starting from nothing. What you have never had is all of it in one place, in front of you, long enough to actually look.
Eight hours, one to one, over Zoom or across a real table, with someone whose only job is catching what comes out.

