The Leech Taxonomy

Marcus had been staring at the blank document for nearly ten minutes before he admitted he wasn't going to write anything.

He'd pulled out the laptop to work. The overhead light was still off and the screen glow did most of the work now, casting the desk in pale blue. He'd sat down intending to finish the proposal. Instead he'd ended up with three things in front of him that he'd placed there without fully deciding to.

The loan note. His brother Daniel's handwriting, quick and tilted, the amount circled twice. "Back by end of the month, promise." Three months old now. Marcus had stopped marking the days.

The org chart from Tuesday's restructure, folded and refolded until the creases had gone white. Emma's new box, level with his, her name in the same font and the same size. He'd mentored her through eleven difficult months — stayed late to review her work, made introductions he hadn't needed to make, talked her through the nights she'd been ready to quit.

"I don't know what I'd do without you," she'd said, more than once. She'd said it like she meant it. She probably had.

Last week, in the strategy meeting, she'd turned to the group and said: "What I've found is that the most effective approach..." — and gone on to present, fluently and confidently, a framework they had built together in his office over six weeks. He had sat very still and looked at his hands.

And Diane's coffee cup, still on the corner of his desk from three weeks ago. She'd left it the Thursday evening she'd decided she was well enough now and didn't need these sessions anymore. "You've been such a support," she'd said. "I genuinely don't know how I'd have got through this without you."

She'd never once asked how he was doing. Not in eight months of evenings. When his own relationship had ended three months in, he'd mentioned it briefly. She'd said, warmly and genuinely: "I would help but I'm barely surviving my own stuff. You understand."

He had understood. He'd said so. He'd driven home alone.

He looked at all three things at once. He'd never done this before — kept them in separate compartments inside himself, been careful to keep each one in its own box where the individual explanations still held. The brother was going through a hard time. Emma was ambitious — that was just the industry. Diane had been healing and he hadn't wanted to burden her.

Each excuse was reasonable by itself. He had been very careful to look at each one by itself.

He started typing — just notes, not an essay. He wanted to see them written in the same place for the first time.

His brother had been loud about it. The warmth arrived with the need and receded when the need was met — sudden and total and then gone. When Marcus had mentioned the contract falling through, Daniel had listened for two minutes. Then: "That's rough, man. Hey, actually, while I have you—" Back to Daniel. Always back.

Emma had been quieter. She'd simply treated the years of investment as credentials that were hers now — the way you absorb a lesson without thinking about where it came from. Diane was the most confusing: she still texted warmly, still thought of them as friends, seemed to have no memory of what eight months had actually looked like from his side of the room.

Different textures. Different stories he'd told himself about each of them. But written in the same place, all three had arrived at exactly the same point.

Marcus's needs had never been part of the arrangement.

He sat with that sentence for a moment. It felt too large and too simple at the same time — the kind of sentence that, once written, changes the shape of everything that came before it.

He picked up Diane's coffee cup and carried it to the kitchen. He washed it in the dark and stood at the sink for a moment, looking out at the street below — late-night quiet, amber light on wet pavement, a cab moving slowly through the rain. He thought about the version of himself that had always been available. That had always understood. That had extended, as a matter of course, a generosity to other people that he had never once thought to extend to himself.

He went back to his desk and sat down.

He had spent years being generous to everyone around him. The clarity, when it came, was simple: he had never once thought to be generous to himself.