His own name had gone some time in the third year of practice.
Not the name itself: he still knew he was Tomas. What had gone was the context around it, who had chosen it, what reasoning had gone into the choosing, the stories he'd once been told about the decision. He had noticed its absence one morning, the way you notice a piece of furniture is gone, and had sat with the space for a while, and had found it, not empty, more like cleared. He understood this was the nature of the work at a certain depth. The practitioners' handbook mentioned it without judgment: at some point the practitioner becomes subject to the practice.
He had no complaint about that.
The brief from the city council was forty-eight pages. He had read it twice. The city wanted a formal release of what it called the inherited structures of the war: the transmission of anger from one generation to the next, the grudges hardened into civic posture, the specific quality of silence between families who had been on different sides. Twenty-three years since the ceasefire. The council believed it had waited long enough.
Tomas did not believe this.
He could feel the difference, in a brief, between a request that came from completion and a request that came from avoidance. They used the same language. They asked for the same thing. But one was ready to release and one was asking forgetting to do the work that grief had not yet finished.
This brief was the second kind.
He wrote his recommendation in the margin: Not yet. The grief work is incomplete. You cannot forget what you have not yet understood. The architecture of the resentment will not release cleanly while the original wound is still live.
He read it back. He crossed out the last sentence. He wrote instead: The forgetting you need is on the other side of something you haven't done yet.
He would tell them what that something was. It was not his job to do it for them, but he could name it, and sometimes naming was enough to start.