Sessions

Everything is pristine and laid out in pale colors and clean lines. From the doorway, I can see her standing in her office, a small room I’ve never been granted access to. She’s moving quickly, fervently speaking into a cell phone as her hands search across her desk; I’ve never seen her like this––like anything other than calm. A lake’s surface broken by a stone. Her posture straightens and she makes her way towards me. Every part of her body moves in polite symphony. She glides to where I awkwardly stand, directs me to the couch. There is so much framed art in here, so many sharp angles in a place where I’m meant to be so vulnerable. Maybe I should tell her. Maybe she knows already. If she doesn’t, it will come out soon enough.

We sit across from each other as we do every six weeks, and she pulls out her notepad, tucked inside a thick manila folder. She flips through about twenty pages until she finds a blank space––room to write, like I’ve found room to breathe.

She has dark hair and dark eyes. Her family is Egyptian. Today I learn that she has a six year-old daughter and am genuinely surprised. I don’t write these facts down; that’s not why we’re here. Something about her reminds me of a deer, not in elegance but in patience, in stillness. She sits in her chair and waits for my voice to come, earnestly writing down whatever pieces of my own words strike her as good enough to chronicle. Sometimes it surprises me, the moments when she bows her head and scratches ink into the pages. Praying. Or writing down the prayers I’ve already spoken. When the Flood comes, will these pages float to the surface?

Artifacts I’ve never seen.

Her voice is quiet, so much so that sometimes I don’t know what she’s saying and find myself smiling and nodding. I see her flip back through the pages in her lap, finding reference points, past evidence to support whatever argument of self I’m trying to make. “Oh, that’s right,” she often says, in a voice an inch above a whisper.

How badly I sometimes want to see those pages––pristine accounts of an ink-stained life.

What answer is she hiding from me? What long words and milligram counts are waiting in the wings? I’ve told her so much––about hopes and anxieties and sick parents and sick selves and just so much sickness that I don’t know how to cure on my own. And still, she writes in that notebook like she will later write on a prescription pad, quiet and precise.

I want to read my own life; I want to see it spread out in linear strokes and pastel colors.

Maybe that will be easier than living in the words.