Leah never activated that reflex. She treated my needs as legitimate from the first call, not as something I needed to justify before she’d confirm they were real. That’s a specific kind of friendship — the kind that reflects your situation back to you without commentary on whether you’re entitled to feel the way you feel about it. I don’t take it for granted.
‘What do you actually want?’ she asked, that first call. Not ‘what are you going to do’ or ‘how are you going to handle this.’ What do you want.
I’d said: ‘I want to have been consulted. I want my office to be mine. I want there to be a plan that doesn’t center on me absorbing a decision that wasn’t mine to make.’
‘Okay,’ she’d said. ‘Those are reasonable things. Now: how do you get them?’
That question — not ‘are you sure you want those things’ or ‘have you considered how your parents feel’ but ‘how do you get them’ — was the question that moved me from feeling to action. Leah did that. I’m grateful for it.
## The Spare Room, Six Months On
My spare room is still a spare room. I changed the sheets after my parents’ four days, put the room back to its previous configuration — storage boxes in the corner, extra bookshelf, the extra monitor I’m not currently using propped against the wall with a plan to set it up at some point.
I had a friend from college stay for a weekend in January. She slept in the spare room with no logistical complications. I had my cousin stay for three days in March when she was in town for a work thing. The room worked exactly the way a guest room is supposed to work.