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I heard the crying before I saw who it was. Walking down the quiet corridor, my footsteps echoing on the tiles, the only other sound was the rhythmic sobbing. It was a strange sound for an office building at midnight. Walking toward my lab, the sound increased, and I could finally tell from which office it was coming. As I drew abreast of his door, which was open, I looked to the left and saw the burly, heavily muscled man dressed in leather, and although his nearly shaved head was bent down and turned away from me, I knew immediately who it was. Guy was a licensed clinical social worker whose therapy practice was limited exclusively to gay men mostly in the S-M community.
He heard me pass and looked over with a wan smile, tears streaming down his face. “Didn’t know anyone else was still here,” he said.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Look at this,” he said gesturing to the large notebook I could see was his appointment schedule, which lay open in his lap.
“Thirty two, Stephan. Thirty two. That’s how many I have buried. I feel like I practice on a battlefield, and my clients are disappearing in death, one by one.”
Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
September 2008 (Vol. 4, Issue 5, Pages 300-301)