Every Other Monday

The moth appeared somewhere between the question about what we each needed more of and the sound of the clock turning past the quarter-hour. It was the color of raw linen — pale, undecided, almost translucent — and small enough to lose if you blinked too long. But it didn’t want to be lost. It circled lazily above us, a silent choreography that made its way between the scratchy sofa, the neutral lamp, and finally, to rest on the toe of my husband’s shoe.

Therapy, I’ve learned, is less about solving things than noticing them. The noticing is its own kind of reverence. The moth, for example — it wasn’t there when we walked in, yet suddenly, it floated between us with a casual kind of intimacy. Maybe it had been hiding behind the curtain all along, waiting for someone to say something worth landing for.

It stayed there, still as a pressed flower, while we talked about our patterns — how much we want to retreat when things feel too tender, how we stay attuned to each other, how marriage, even when it’s healthy, is sometimes just a long conversation about staying soft when everything in you wants to harden.

He was talking about professional ambition, I think, when I first noticed the moth. The therapist nodded in that quiet, practiced way therapists do — the way that says, I’m here, keep going. I watched my husband’s shoe instead. The moth hadn’t moved. I thought about whether he’d noticed it, whether he’d flinch when it finally did.

There’s a strange intimacy in the things only one of you notices.

We go to therapy every other Monday. Not because anything’s broken, exactly, but because we want to understand what we’re building. The room always smells faintly of old wood and crinkled paper — a smell that belongs to both comfort and effort. There’s a painting of a tree hanging slightly crooked on the wall, and a box of tissues placed within easy reach. The air feels careful. Time moves differently there — softer around the edges.

Sometimes, I think therapy is like standing in a room of mirrors and trying to see which reflection is truest. Not just of yourself, but of the person across from you. There’s the version of you who wants to be right, the one who wants to be kind, and the one who just wants to be understood. They rarely all fit in the same frame.

The moth shifted once, slightly, as if readjusting its weight. Its wings caught the light and shimmered, faintly iridescent. For a moment, I thought of all the places it could have come from — the hallway outside, the open door, an afternoon before this one where it beat itself against glass in pursuit of something bright.

Moths are creatures of transformation, but their metamorphosis is quiet. They are not born from the spectacle of color like butterflies; they come from darkness. They seek light, yes, but in that seeking there’s always a risk — the flame, the lamp, the inevitability of burning. There’s something tragic and noble about that, and I’ve always felt that people, especially those who love deeply, are a little like moths. Drawn to illumination, but changed by it in ways we can’t always predict.

I wonder sometimes if that’s what marriage really is: two people moving toward the same light, floating amongst each other with a shared vision and purpose.

We were talking about the future — our next steps, our plans, how we want to grow — when the therapist asked what we each feared might get in the way. I said something about control. He said something about loss. Both of us were right. Both of us were alluding the deeper thing — the tender middle where control and loss meet, where you learn that loving someone is a kind of surrender.

When I glanced down again, the moth was still there, resting like a period at the end of a sentence.

I thought of all the transformations I’ve mistaken for endings. The slow erosion of certainty that often precedes growth. The quiet that feels like disconnection but might just be processing. The dark, cocooned part of becoming that nobody writes poems about because it isn’t pretty yet.

Change doesn’t announce itself. It slips into the room like that moth — small, uninvited, oddly patient.

When the session ended, we stood, both of us reluctant to break the spell. My husband reached for his hat, and the moth lifted, tracing a small arc through the air before fluttering out the door. We both noticed. We didn’t speak of it.

In the car, the air between us felt light, as it always does. We didn’t analyze or rehash — just let silence do what it does best when it’s not heavy: hold space. The road stretched long and pale under the afternoon sun. I thought of the moth again, how it had chosen his shoe, how it had stayed there long enough to be witnessed.

There’s a word in Japanese — komorebi — that means the light filtering through trees. It’s not just about the light itself, but the pattern it creates, the in-betweenness. That’s what this felt like. Therapy. Marriage. The moth. None of them are about clarity, not really. They’re about the soft interruption between what was and what will be.

I used to think growth looked like a breakthrough — a single, decisive moment when you finally understood everything. But now I think it’s more like this: a slow noticing. A conversation you have every other Monday where you realize the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are — and who you are together — might not be the whole story.

Moths are drawn to light, but they navigate by the moon. Scientists call it “transverse orientation” — a way of keeping a constant angle to a distant light source so they can fly straight. The trouble is, when they mistake artificial light for the moon, they spiral. They lose their course. They crash.

There’s a metaphor there, one I don’t entirely trust but can’t ignore. Maybe part of loving someone is learning which light to follow. Maybe therapy is where we remember the difference between the moon and the lamp.

Sometimes I wish I could tell the moth it was seen — that its brief, accidental visit became something sacred. But maybe that’s the point: we’re not meant to tell. We’re meant to notice.

Later, as I got ready for bed, I thought about all the other rooms where change begins quietly — the ones without witnesses. A woman sitting in her parked car, breathing through the ache of forgiveness. A couple deciding not to walk away this time. A man realizing he can love differently than he was taught to. The world is full of small metamorphoses that go unrecorded.

Maybe healing isn’t about becoming something new. Maybe it’s about returning to something truer — the soft animal part of ourselves that remembers how to stay.

The moth landed on his shoe and stayed there through most of our hour together. It wasn’t a sign, exactly, but it was something — a small interruption in the ordinary rhythm, a reminder that in our trying, in our speaking and fumbling and reaching, there’s beauty in stillness.

We don’t always notice when transformation begins. It often starts mid-sentence, under fluorescent light, with a moth resting quietly on the shoe of the person you love.