When I entered the building where the practice was located, the never-ending construction site had shifted from the street to the doorstep. Two workers were peering into the holes that jutted out of the pavement next to the entrance, looking uncertain. It was apparently not yet entirely clear how things were supposed to proceed. On my way in, I squeezed past them and found myself in the office shortly afterward, equally unsure of what the construction work meant for me.

For months, the construction site had been a stumbling block in our conversations. It made no difference whether the work was being done on the facades of the buildings across the street or whether the pavement—along with the sewer system beneath it—was being torn up. Jackhammers drove a wedge between my therapist and me. Whether we wanted to or not, we were forced to interrupt our sentences or speak over the noise with unaccustomed effort. The conversation took on a strained quality and followed an erratic start-stop rhythm that had nothing to do with the syntax of our language. The disruption was perfect because the ease was gone. Nothing could be said offhand and turned into the next topic.

In my memory, the construction site moves across the street as if in a wildly trembling time-lapse. In therapy, I had begun to see myself as the problem that needed to be repaired or renewed. I compared myself to the pried-open facade and the nearest excavation pit. Beneath the pavement—that’s where I was. And now I lay there exposed, utterly stripped bare, while my therapist picked up the next tool to work on my inner self. The construction site served as a metaphor for me to attribute to myself a passivity all too familiar to me: something was happening, something was being done to me, without me being able to do anything about it. I referred to myself as a construction site whenever the conversation got too personal and I wanted to complain. And so we dragged on, with one delay in the workflow following another.

The new construction work had come surprisingly close to the practice. After a brief back-and-forth, the two workers went on with their work. There was creaking and hammering on the floor until a dull thud made me flinch. Then the sound of a jackhammer seemed to be working its way deeper and deeper into the house at regular intervals. Our conversation nearly ground to a halt, but the noise gave way to the hesitant scraping of a shovel against stony ground. And we didn’t talk any further about the construction work and its consequences, but we did talk about the silence that kept overwhelming me during the sessions. I had internalized the idea that it was better to say nothing than to reveal too much about myself. As if I can't express the way I feel, the way I feel without fucking up something else. And now I heard myself talking about how I was gradually able to shed this pattern.

Soon after, I left the office. From the front door, there was no longer any sign of the construction site. The pavement had settled quite naturally over the sand, pipes, and drains running beneath the sidewalk. A reality that completely contradicted my interpretation of the intrusive background noise. I thought about how quickly the pavement could open and close, how the water must constantly flow through the orderly arrangement of stone, sand, and dirt. And for a moment, I grinned to myself. I imagined that I was no longer the construction site, but rather the pill bug that had found its new home between the underground and the upper world, between the inside and the outside.