I was just thinking about it again, this… interaction, I suppose, with the young man who came to look at the furnace. It’s not a major thing, not really. The pilot light, it just… flickers sometimes, goes out if there’s a strong wind, and then you have to relight it, which is becoming a bit of a challenge for these old hands, you know? The arthritis isn’t quite what it used to be. And it’s not just the dexterity, it’s the bending, the getting down on the knees, and then the getting *up* again, which is a whole other matter. My late husband, bless his soul, he would have fixed it in a snap. Walter was always so capable with his hands, a real engineer at heart, even if he worked in accounting all those years. He used to say, “Helen, if it has a moving part, I can usually figure it out.” And he always did. After he passed, I had to learn to… delegate, I suppose is the word. Find people, trust them with things. It’s a different kind of reliance. So this young man, he couldn’t have been more than thirty, maybe thirty-two at the absolute most. And he had this look about him, almost a clinical detachment, like he was observing a specimen, not listening to a person. I tried to explain the intermittency, the *variability* of the symptom presentation, if you will. How it wasn’t constant, but episodic, influenced by external factors like the weather. I even brought up the differential diagnosis – could it be the thermocouple, or perhaps a draft issue? I’ve done my research, you see. I was a librarian for forty years; information retrieval is practically ingrained in my very being. But he just kept… interrupting. “Ma’am, it’s usually the thermocouple,” he’d say, or “We’ll just replace the whole unit if it’s too old.” Like I hadn’t just articulated the nuances of the situation. It wasn't the replacement of the part that bothered me, not really, it was the dismissal of my data. It felt like he was treating me as if my subjective experience, my meticulous observations, were irrelevant. And it brought me back, you know, to when Richard and I were going through the divorce. Not the furnace man, no, but the *feeling*. That feeling of trying to explain something so fundamental, so deeply felt and experienced, and having it just… not register. Like speaking a language no one else understands. Richard, my ex-husband, he was a very direct man. Very concrete. And when I would try to explain the subtle shifts, the emotional climate, the psychological architecture of our disconnect, he would just look at me and say, “Helen, you’re overthinking it. It’s simple. We just don’t get along anymore.” And then his friends, they all took his side, because he was so *certain*. And I was left feeling like my perfectly valid, thoroughly reasoned perspective was just… noise. So I suppose, when this young man talked over me, it wasn’t really about the furnace at all. It was just a re-enactment, a small, mundane echo of a much larger, much more painful erasure. And I just stood there, holding my cup of tea, watching him scribble on his clipboard, and I felt… a kind of deep, quiet sorrow, for all the things that are never truly heard.