Chapter Three #3
“Big Red doesn’t have a microchip,” the animal shelter employee tells me. She puts the cat down on the counter between us. “And I’m afraid there’s no room at the inn.”
“What?” I ask.
“Unfortunately, there’s no available space for this big guy,” she clarifies. “We’re completely full.”
She’s patting the cat’s back. He’s purring.
“So I can’t leave him here?” I ask.
“Well, you could, but… uh.”
I frown. “What would happen to him?”
She doesn’t look at me.
“What would happen to him?” I ask again, quietly.
I shut the door to Joy’s workshop. I’ve secured Big Red inside.
I’m in a rush. I have to go to therapy. I can’t put him in the house because properly introducing cats to each other requires careful preparation.
There’s a whole procedure to it. Cats are territorial, and they need to acclimate to each other.
I’ve put a pillow on the ground, a box of cat litter in the corner, and served him a can of Fancy Feast with a bowl of water. I’ve covered Joy’s workstations in a protective tarp and secured all the books she’s repaired in closed storage.
“I’ll be back in about an hour,” I tell him.
“Be safe, please,” I add.
He looks at me.
“How have you been feeling since our last session?” Dr. Jeong asks.
I’m sitting on a couch in my therapist’s office. There’s a bowl of mints and a tabletop water fountain in front of me. The fountain makes a babbling sound.
“Better,” I say.
“You’re back to work? How’s that going?”
“Yes. Today was my second day back. It’s going well so far.”
Should I tell her I cried in my car and in the bathroom this morning?
“And you’ve still noticed a positive change since taking your medication?”
I nod. “Yes. It’s helped a lot, I think. I’m still not totally feeling like myself, but I’m on the mend for sure.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that. And are you sleeping through the night?”
“I didn’t sleep very well last night,” I admit. “I should have taken a sleeping pill, but I waited too long. I didn’t want to take it in the middle of the night and knock myself out when I had to work in the morning.”
She writes something down. “You should take one tonight, okay? Lack of sleep has a significant impact on you.”
In a previous session, she told me that sleep deprivation disrupts our neurotransmitters. When Joy found me naked on the dock, I hadn’t slept in three days.
“Shall we do some grounding work to get started?” She hands me a red-and-white peppermint from her candy dish.
I put it in the palm of my hand.
“How does it feel?” she asks.
I’m terrible at these exercises. I have a hard time taking them seriously.
“It feels like a mint,” I say.
“Go on.”
“Uh, it’s a hard mint. I guess it feels like a rock.” I grip it. “The plastic wrapper on it makes a crunching sound.”
“Open it. How does it smell?”
I unwrap it and hold it to my nose. “Fresh.”
“If you’re comfortable doing so, please close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths.”
I don’t feel comfortable, but I close my eyes anyway. I don’t want to be difficult. I want to be a good sport. A lot of therapy feels hokey to me, but I’m trying to take it seriously because I want to get better.
When I was a kid, I wanted my teachers to like me. I was the student they sat next to the troublesome, unruly kids because of my good influence. I listened, raised my hand, and kept my desk neat. My report cards were glowing. I was a pleasure to have in class.
I feel a compulsion to behave similarly in these sessions. I want to be Dr. Jeong’s star patient. I want to earn an A+ in therapy.
“If you’re open to it, I’d like us to practice imaginal revisiting,” she says.
She introduced me to this in our last session. She sent me home with a printout about it. It’s a form of treatment that’s supposed to help me process memories and emotions.
I nod. “Yes. Sure.”
“All right, I’d like you to think of a specific memory from your relationship with Ben. It could be any memory that stands out to you.”
I say, “I’m sorry. My memory is foggy when it comes to Ben. I’m not sure I remember much.”
“You don’t have to recall it perfectly. Take your time.”
All my memories of Ben are vague. I was eighteen when he and I met. Twenty-three when we broke up. I’m thirty-two now. Memories fade when you neglect them. Ever since I broke up with Ben, I’ve spent most of the time actively trying not to think of him.
“I sort of remember the day we met,” I say.
“Can you try to describe where you were? How it looked and felt?”
I think for a moment, then say, “We were at a call center. We’d both just been hired to sell cruise line tickets. We were in orientation in this training room. It was like a computer lab. There were fluorescent lights. I think I felt nervous to start the job.”
“What do you remember about your interaction with Ben that day?”
My eyes are still closed. I’m trying to remember Ben’s face.
Of course, I know what he looked like. We were together for years.
We lived together. I know he had hazel eyes and a big mouth.
The structure of his face is jumbled now, though.
I can’t fully picture him. I can see the puzzle pieces that make him up, but I can’t put them together.
“I was having a hard time remembering the phonetic alphabet,” I say.
“They made us learn it, and this script. We had to memorize all these lines. There was a test we had to take at the end of the shift. I was worried I’d fail it.
Ben and I chatted during our lunch break.
He was nice. I told him I was nervous for the test. He said not to worry and sat beside me later.
When the instructor wasn’t looking, he let me cheat off him. ”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Relieved,” I say. “I felt appreciative. I think I may have also sensed that he liked me, so I felt kind of awkward and flattered.”
“What else do you remember?”
I still can’t really picture Ben’s face. I’m trying to think of his teeth. Were they crooked? I don’t remember. When we were together, I recognized his shadow. I could pick his hands out of a lineup. I knew his nailbeds.
“It was nighttime at the end of our shift,” I say.
“He and I walked out together. I think it was July. I’m not sure.
Maybe it was August. He walked me to my bus stop and waited with me, even though he wasn’t taking the bus.
He lived nearby, so he was going to walk home.
But it was dark out, and the call center was in sort of a rough area.
I appreciated him waiting there with me.
We talked. I don’t remember what about. I was certain he liked me at this point, though. He was smiling, making eye contact.”
“How did you feel about Ben liking you?”
I had just moved out of my parents’ house.
I left at the beginning of the summer, months before college started, because I wanted to escape.
My mom was as controlling as ever, and we were fighting a lot.
My parents didn’t approve, and my mom was so angry she didn’t speak to me until October that year.
When I first moved out, I was worried my mom was right. It took a while to find that job, and I didn’t have much money. I remember sitting alone in my apartment, cross-legged on my twin-size bed, feeling like I was a lost kid pretending to be a grown-up. I thought maybe I’d made a big mistake.
Ben appeared right when I needed someone. I felt a spotlight cast on me when he looked at me. I thought it was so nice of him to like me.
“I felt happy,” I say. “I thought he was really nice. I appreciated that he wanted me to be safe getting home. I thought maybe I liked him back. It was hard for me to tell the difference between being flattered and liking someone, back then.”
I was never truly attracted to Ben, but I could see why someone would be.
As a kid, I used to pick guys to have crushes on.
I wasn’t aware I was doing it. I thought everyone’s crush was a calculated choice.
I based who I liked on criteria like: Does he like me?
Would other girls think he’s good-looking?
Would I pick him to be my friend? When I met Ben, my answer to all those questions was yes.
“Okay, good. When you’re ready, please open your eyes.”
I open them immediately.
“How did you feel revisiting that memory? Have any insights emerged for you?”
I don’t know how she wants me to answer.
I open my mouth and ramble. “When Ben and I were together, I thought of that day as sort of sweet. Now, I wonder why he liked me. I was really insecure and quiet. And he was ten years older than me. I felt safe with him walking to the bus stop, but he was a stranger then. In retrospect, it’s bizarre that I felt protected by a strange older man walking with me in the dark. ”
She’s writing something down. I squint at her paper in an attempt to read what she’s scribbling, but I’m too far away.
To help her with her notes, I add, “I think I used to be overly focused on other people’s feelings, and out of touch with my own.
I think maybe I was taught not to trust my own gut and was sort of hyper-keyed into the feelings and objectives of others.
So I did things like wait for a bus at night with a man I’d just met because I’d muted my own instincts and was too focused on putting myself in his shoes. Does that help with your notes?”
She pauses. Her pen hovers over her paper. “Do you notice that you’re focused on my perspective before your own right now?”
The cat is asleep on his pillow. I texted Joy about bringing him home and setting him up in her workshop. She wrote back, What should we name him?
I replied, We’re not keeping him. We can’t have three cats.
She said, I want to name him Garfield.
We’re not naming him Garfield.
Thomas O’Malley?
No.
What about kyle?
Maybe.
I put my face underwater. I’m in the bath. I lit a candle. The bathroom smells like vanilla and patchouli.