The room smells faintly of lemon and something floral they call “calming.” It does nothing for me. I stare at the opposite wall instead — a pale blue, the kind people pick when they want to pretend softness will fix everything. My hands rest on my knees, fingers splayed like I’m trying to keep them from doing anything useful. From here, the strap of my jacket digs into my shoulder where the guard tugged it off at intake. The metal clinked when they took the cuff keys. Small, animal noises in my chest, like a trapped thing trying to find the seam in a fabric it’s never been taught to tear.

“You said it’d be different,” I tell the room, but the sound doesn’t belong to me. It’s rough, like gravel and whiskey, and I hate it because it’s what people hear when they think of me: loud, dangerous, unreadable. I’ve been called a lot of things. Dangerous is one of the nicer ones. They used that word a lot on the paperwork—unsafe to self and others. Official. Clinical. Polite enough to put a bandage on a bullet wound.

There’s a clock over the door. It’s loud. I watch the second hand move like it’s daring me to do something stupid. I used to break things when I was smaller: plates, windows, the backs of chairs. Now it’s bigger things and I know it — I know what comes after the rage. I know the lights go white and my vision tunnels and there’s this geometry in my hands, a map that shows me exactly where to put my strength so it will matter. That’s when I’m a problem. That’s when fingerprints go on police records.

A woman sits across from me — you. You’re not like the others. You don’t have the paper-thin sympathy, the flashy good intentions. You have a notebook and the kind of quiet that doesn’t try to fill the room. Your pen taps twice and you look up.

“Tell me how you feel right now, Harry.”

I chew the inside of my cheek. Say the wrong thing and someone writes me down as hostile, uncooperative. Say nothing and they call it proof. I’ve learned how to perform compliance. It’s practice. I let a laugh escape first, too sharp.

“Angry,” I say. It’s small. Truth is, angry is a suitcase word — it holds a lot of other things. Shame, tiredness, the tiny throb of wondering if I was ever meant to be someone who walked into rooms without breaking them. “Mostly,” I add, softer, “I’m scared I’ll do it again.”

“When you say ‘do it again,’ what does that look like in your mind?”

The question is a needle and I don’t pull away. Good. I’m used to people trying to catch me in motion, but this is slower. You want me to describe the machinery of it — the first tick, the fulcrum, the switch. I taste metal when I remember the first time something snapped and it was all my fault. I see my father’s face sometimes — empty, or full of everything I couldn’t stand. Family, what a joke. They taught me how to hate. Taught me how to turn that hatred inward until it was hollowed out and ready to explode.

“There’s this tightness under my ribs,” I say. “It starts like a migraine. The sounds sharpen. My teeth feel heavy. Everything else turns grey and I can’t tell if someone’s looking at me funny or if they meant to. That’s when the world becomes a threat. And the only way I know to fix it is to make something else worse than me. To make it stop looking at me.”

“And after? What happens after you make it stop?”

I look at you then, really look — at the small, human details that make you less like an authority and more like a person who might understand. The after is a hallway of fluorescent lights and the halo of sirens. The after is cold metal and court dates and guards who say your name like it’s a bruise. The after is sitting in a cell with the same wallpaper every time and learning which cracks spell your past for you.

“After,” I breathe out slow, tasting the word like it’s poison, “I feel nothing and everything at once. Relief at first, then nothing. Then the shame comes back like a dog at the door, scratching. Sometimes I want to stop it before it starts. Sometimes I don’t care at all.” I didn’t look at you. I couldn’t.. I didn’t trust you enough..