The client sitting across from her had deleted their memory of a person three years ago. The relationship had ended badly and the deletion had been clean, nothing remained of the content, the face, the events. But the residue had been causing trouble. Every time someone spoke in a particular way, a quality in the voice rather than anything said, something in the residue stirred.
Reln asked them to describe the residue not as a feeling but as a physical object. What shape, what weight, where in the body, what temperature. This was the standard entry into the work. People arrived using emotional language, which described the sensation but not the thing. Once they described it as an object, they could be more precise.
The client said: it is like a door. My hand knows how to open it. The motion is completely automatic. But there is nothing on the other side. Just the motion of opening a door to nothing.
Reln wrote this down. Door. Procedural. No content on access. She had heard versions of this before. The procedural residues were some of the more interesting ones, because deletion preserved motor memory in ways that declarative deletion did not. The body retained the shape of the relationship without retaining anything about it. People found this disturbing when they noticed it, but Reln had come to find it illuminating. The body's record was, in some ways, more accurate than the declarative one had been. Procedures were what you actually did, as distinct from what you thought about doing.
After the session, she sat at her desk and made her notes. Her client's file was on the right side of the desk. Her own file was on the left side.
She had opened her own file twice since creating it. Once when she made the entry at age thirty-two: three items deleted in the same week, total weight assessed and noted, no further description. Once at thirty-eight, when she had begun this practice and wanted to understand what she was asking of clients. She had read her own entry then and it had been uninformative. Weight only. No description, no context. She had closed the file.
She had the skills now to do a proper mapping. Shape, temperature, location, procedural components if any. Six years of developing a method that she had used with over a hundred clients. She knew exactly what her own session would look like.
She finished her notes on the day's last client. She closed the client's file, which went into the cabinet on the right. Her own file was on the left side of the desk, the same distance from her hand as the client's file had been from their hand at the start of the session. She slid it toward the cabinet. Then she left it there and went to make tea.