Vann had been working with returning practitioners for eleven years, which is what they were called: people who had achieved full presence and then found their way back. Most of them, at the time of their return, described it the same way. Relief, followed by a quiet mourning that decreased over weeks, followed by the ordinary life, which was not small but was bearable. He kept a notebook for each of them. The notebooks were full.
Orla had been in full presence for two years when she first contacted him. She was thirty-one. In her message she said: I don't want to come back. I want to know how to carry it.
He replied that he had never done that. He had helped fifty-six people return. He had not helped anyone stay.
She came anyway.
She sat across from him in the small room he used for sessions, and he could see the quality of her attention — the way everything in the room existed a little more completely when someone in full presence was looking at it. The light did something. Even the furniture did something.
He told her: the return process is well-documented. Hundreds of practitioners have come back. There are methods. They work.
She said: I know. I've read the literature.
He said: I have no corresponding literature for what you're asking.
She said: I know that too.
He asked her why she didn't want to return. He had asked this of every practitioner he'd worked with, as an intake question, to understand the shape of their resistance. Most of them said: I can't sustain it. Or: my life requires me to function. Or: I didn't choose it and I want to unchoose it.
Orla said: I chose it, and I want to keep the choice.
He had spent eleven years with people for whom the choice had become untenable. He had built his entire practice on the untenable. He didn't have an answer for someone who wanted to stay.
She sat with his silence the way she sat with everything — completely. He had the sensation, which he'd had before with returning practitioners, of being seen more fully than he was comfortable with.
He said: I don't know if what you're asking is possible.
She said: then teach me to try.
He opened the blank notebook he had brought to the session. He wrote her name at the top of the first page. Beneath it he wrote: Session one. He looked at the page for a moment. Then he wrote: What can be carried?
He didn't know the answer. He wrote the question because it was the only honest next thing.