I don’t want to finish the block puzzle. My therapist gazes at me from across her marble kitchen countertop. She’s been observing me from about a foot away, nodding along as I wind red diagonals together to replicate the three-dimensional version of the picture printed on a stapled packet of copy paper.
My therapist is four feet tall and wearing denim overalls. This is my first time meeting her in person after nearly a year of online sessions. She proposed that being in the same room together might help us understand one another better. Her office is in an apartment, a few floors above the apartment where she sleeps, in a tall brick residential building lodged deep in Brooklyn. On the sixth floor, the walls in the hallway have been stripped to reveal Pepto pink insulation. The air is thick with debris—her reason for cancelling our previous attempt at an in-person session.
On our most recent video call, she told me I might have a visuospatial deficit. I’d mentioned that, given a recent development, I’d been feeling happy to have a reason to feel “more tethered” to New York. She said she didn’t understand what I meant by that. In fact, she often found it difficult to relate to the way I described my feelings. She asked me a series of questions: Did I get nervous in crowded places? Was I a clumsy person? Did I struggle with directions? Was I a bad driver? She proposed that I come into her office and take a few tests. I asked her, if I were to be diagnosed, what would happen after. Well, I’ve told one client who works as a surgeon to go into the operating room before a surgery and take pictures of everything with his phone. Then, she recommended I try taking improv classes for the—I’ve been counting—fourth time.
I knew I wasn’t going to be having any of it, and I’m not. I’m drinking water out of a plastic cup that tastes like it once held any number of Doritos. Made test subject, I feel like an infant. An idiot. But I smile with the same passive obedience I began therapy intending to shed. I try to redraw a complex shape from memory. I make eraser-less pencil dashes on all of the orange circles and none of the purple stars, as fast as I can. I replicate six block configurations before I politely declare myself done. My therapist suggests that we try a few language-processing tests, undoubtedly for the sake of my ego.
She opens a kitchen drawer and brings me a test with some of the following questions, designed to be answered marked YES or NO as quickly as possible:
Are band-aids used for healing?
Can you eat without a mouth?
Are computers used to brush your teeth with?
Can you see in the dark with a flashlight?
Do cows sleep in beds?
Do some people use an umbrella when it’s raining?
The second test is even more poetic. She asks me to describe what 2 and 7 have in common. I begin describing their shapes, but the answer is simpler. I catch on, even as the questions become more complex. Music and tide? Anchor and fence? Friend and enemy? Allow and restrict?
I relish this part. I’m briefly soothed. I watch the spring snow carry past her floor-to-ceiling windows. Then, I go sit on her floor next to a stand with a stone-potted succulent and we spend the rest of the session talking about what we always talk about, which is what type of job I should get. She argues that my visuospatial deficit has ruled out returning to the restaurant industry, unless I can take pictures of the dining room before a shift. What about being a TaskRabbit? What about being a nanny? Have I tried emailing the editor of The Paris Review to ask for a job? Or, have I ever heard of writing B2B copy? Did I get her friend’s website link in my inbox?
I let us talk in circles about my least favorite subject in the world because she’s a well-trained neuropsychologist with many degrees and I don’t want to be rude. She pauses midway through, like she often does, to squint at me and say that she can’t tell what I’m thinking. I get flustered and defensive, like I often do. We spin around in the gyre forever and I leave in a self-hating stupor.
=
Carmine and I meet at the closest corner of the park and wind our way north. I float the idea that all therapists must be hacks. She kept calling him “Carlos” during a recent session. She’s convinced my parents are alcoholics, although I’ve tried to correct her many times. She still hasn’t figured out anything with my insurance, and after what she described as a “breach in the system,” has stopped billing me entirely. She forgets about our sessions often. Perhaps it’s a bad fit, but still—I can’t remember what I even wanted out of this.
Everyone should be in therapy, everyone says. To be in therapy is a modern sign of virtue. But I think I started therapy because I was writing about some fucked up things and wondered if my sudden urge to revisit disturbing memories would be better diverted to a conversation with a professional rather than an unsolicited monologue to strangers. My closest, longest friend had also just moved away and stopped returning my texts, and that had rattled my ability to believe in anything at all. More than that, maybe, I hoped to challenge myself to become a braver person. Someone who wouldn’t get so easily steamrolled under life’s unpredictable turns.
But what if this is all just some kind of elaborate test concocted by my therapist? Is she just giving me the most comically awful therapy imaginable until I’m forced to stand up for myself? I mean, she’s even resorted to diagnosing me as an imbecile!
I’ve broken my first real sweat of the summer. Carmine is wounded by the “hack” theory. Becoming a therapist is his backup career. No doubt he’d make a fantastic one. He listens to my problems with precise understanding, and his advice is good, but never seems too harshly utilitarian. Of course, I feel ashamed for wanting to be coddled by a therapist. It’s difficult not to turn them into your parent. My mother is an adept problem-solver, and I spent my entire adolescence begging her to feel sorry for me.
We reach the opposite end of the park, and my self-pitying tirade is interrupted by a demonstration flowing toward the steps of the public library. In the halting traffic of the roundabout, a few people are stripped away by cops, spitting and screaming, from the procession’s bounds. There’s no getting through without getting closer. I’m paralyzed by a forceful arrest that happens about ten feet from me. I watch someone get ground into the pavement by the bully-club body of a cop. Through the crush of bare calves, I can glimpse their upheld wrists being sinched together by a zip-tie. This is the type of scene I’ve undoubtedly witnessed hundreds of times on video, but never up close, in the flesh. I’m reminded of how sheltered I’ve let myself become.
==
What do interior and exterior have in common?
Distance and closeness?
Sight and reflex?
==
I never thought, for a moment, that my therapist was wrong about the visuospatial deficit.
I have always considered myself a terrible driver. I’m an anxious one. It was one of the first ways I learned one could die. It named my brother after my uncle, who flew through a windshield when my mother was 16. She’d done too good of a job populating my mind with that and all the other shit she’d seen while working in the ICU. Once I took a long drive with a Goth girl I was friends with as a teenager, and when we parked she looked deep into my eyes and told me that she knew how I was going to die—she just didn’t want to tell me because it was too sad. In college I began having recurring dreams of dying in car accidents, so vivid I could smell smoke, feel the heat of flames, and the sensation of metal worming its way into my skin, the crumpling of my body, the divvying up of my spine. I’ve never had any trouble visualizing a fatal accident, so I never drove with any illusion of safety. To increase my chances of survival, I always avoided highways.
It’s the day before my brother’s wedding, so I toggle on the “avoid highways” feature on maps for the drive back from a strip mall where I’ve just purchased a desperate pack of seamless underwear. I feel brave even offering to drive the rental—it’s been a while—but I have Carmine in the passenger seat, who can correct me if I happen to have any amnesia over what to do. I need to grow up. Baby steps, of course. And I love backroads.
The route takes me down a long one that ends with a stop sign. It’s the type of left turn I always hesitate on. With no lights, I’m waiting as long as possible for a comfortable break in the traffic. Then, I think, no—Normal drivers don’t need to hold up the cars behind them. They can judge timing and distance and just make the fucking turn. My right side clears, and then I get Carmine’s approval that I have enough room on the left for good measure. Once I’m in the middle of the road, we both realize this is not the case. I panic and slow once the approval is rescinded.
As the car hurtles into my periphery, there’s a suspended moment of anticipation—dense with fear and hope. This can’t happen. Maybe it won’t. Then, force and a sudden change of sound and pressure, like being knocked under a wave. We’re moving without volition. There is no more sound. In the impact’s spin, I swear a lot of preventative foresight descends. I think about the basic insurance package I chose on the rental, and what it means to kill all I love.
Somehow we end up on the grassy strip by the Greek Orthodox church. Carmine tells me to brake, because we’re still in motion. I brake. I look over at him and there’s blood moving down the side of his face. Otherwise, he’s alive, dazed, but speaking to me. I look at my feet, then my legs, which are in pain but unmangled, my body miraculously whole, even as I note that the door is now crushed all around it. The lighting is pale because all the airbags have bloomed, it appears we’re inside an egg. Smoke filters through the interior fractures. I sense the car’s busted resoluteness against the throb in my throat, all gears fully on for the first time in a long time: not dead, not dead, not dead. Scattered metal strobes on the pavement. Two choruses of cicadas begin to drone over one another from beyond the tall grass, in the kudzu. They are so unlike the artificial track I’ve been using to lull myself into a sleep in which I might forget the person I am. I look down and notice that the scratch on my foot is less than a centimeter.
=
The dreams start up again a few weeks later, not much different than they’ve always been.
Poet Lyn Hejinian, in her collection Book of A Thousand Eyes:
Is it original? Inevitable? We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture Of events that have already happened so we can picture Them. ... But isn’t that the problem with beauty—that it’s apt in retrospect To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling A new day—it has the psychical quality of “pastness” and they are trailing It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.
Writing of dreams throughout the book, she ponders them as our sleeping mind’s interpretation of waking memory. I wonder about interpreting an interpretation. I’ve asked my therapist to try to parse my dread before. Always something to do with guilt, she says.
Yet how preordained the accident seems, now, in my desperate attempt to find common threads in my life—and how natural that the dreams continue. I want to believe that no dream is original, nor finite in any direction.
After sitting in the ER for seven hours, Carmine’s laceration is ultimately shallow, the concussion mild. My guilt almost outweighs the sensation of deep luck. The next day’s wedding is perfect, off without a hitch. In a miracle of hand-eye coordination, I manage to catch the bouquet as it topples in my direction.
When I return to Brooklyn, my therapist texts to ask how I’m feeling, and if I want to continue with our next session. I’ve recently been baited by an article titled 21 Ways to Break Up with Your Therapist. Most of these anecdotes involve concocting elaborate white lies or blocking their number—I called and told her I was dumping my boyfriend and moving back to New York; I told her my work schedule was changing and it was no longer possible to make our appointments. Then I ignored her calls for three months; Ultimately I just had to ghost him; I told her I was training for a marathon (I had never run before in my life) and that it was going to be my only priority for a while and I’d reach out after the New York City Marathon was over. On and on. I laughed—this was the exact type of passive avoidance I’d been so disgusted with in myself. Yet I recognized that I’d gotten better in the past year. I had no desire to lie to my therapist. My addiction to resolution, at least, felt more potent.
In Lydia Davis’s story “Therapy,” the character she embodies experiences sudden bouts of stasis. She loses movement, speech, excitement, love. She sees a doctor in the winter who she endlessly “abuses and insults,” and she considers never returning with each session because he doesn’t take notes, never smiles, criticizes her mother, and sees but looks past her. She attributes his breaking down and re-patterning of her feelings to her inability to understand them herself. A deafness and confusion. Then, spring comes, and she begins laughing again, and taking stumbling walks in the streets. She attributes this change to her doctor, and concludes:
I thought that since I was better, my therapy should end soon. I was impatient, and I wondered: How did therapy come to an end? I had other questions too: for instance, How much longer would I continue to need all my strength just to take myself from one day to the next? There was no answer to that one. There would be no end to therapy, either, or I would not be the one who chose to end it.
I had an instinct that my therapist was tired of the cycle, and the wall she kept referencing. My vacancy, my defensiveness. The next session, I waste no time going into the petty specifics of my disappointment with her improv-pushing. I tell her, honestly, that I wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation a year ago. Perhaps I have her to thank for that. And then—ever so gently—we end it. ==