The client was thirty-four. She had been in a long relationship, six years, and she was not unhappy in it, and she could not decide whether to stay. She had been unable to decide for the entire six years, and she had come to Sirel because she wanted to make a clarity wish: a wish for the decision itself to become clear, for the ambivalence to resolve into a direction she could follow.
Sirel had seen this type of request before. It was not the most common, but it was familiar.
"The mechanism is specific about clarity wishes, " Sirel said. "It tends to pull from the ambivalent memories. The ones that contain both possibilities at once, the ones that hold both sides of the thing you can't decide. Those have the right weight for a clarity exchange."
The client looked at her. "So I might lose the memories of why I couldn't decide."
"The specific texture of them, yes. The undecided quality. You would retain the factual content, you'd still know what happened, still know the relationship. But you might lose the feeling of what made it complicated. What it felt like to be genuinely unsure."
"And I'd be clear."
"Presumably, yes."
The client was quiet. Sirel let her be quiet. This was the part of the work that required the most patience: the moment after someone understood what they were being asked to give, before they had decided whether to give it.
"The thing I keep coming back to, " the client said finally, "is that I don't know if the ambivalence is noise or information. I can't tell if it's something wrong with my thinking, or if the fact that I can't decide is telling me something real about the situation."
"That's the question a lot of people bring here, " Sirel said. "I can't answer it for you. The mechanism can't answer it either, the wish would just resolve the question without telling you which it was."
"Then I'd have an answer, but I wouldn't know what the answer meant."
"You'd have a direction. What it means would be something you'd figure out afterward."
The client said she needed to think about it. She would come back. Sirel gave her the usual materials and walked her out.
After the client left, Sirel stood at the window. Nine years of this work and she had never made a wish herself. She had been aware, for a long time, that this was either professional discipline or its own kind of failure of nerve, and she had never been able to tell the difference. The ambivalence, she thought, was probably information. She was just not sure what it was information about.
She went back to her desk. She had a five o'clock.