Ice Cream

The lady next to me who really knows me tells me about her therapist. “He’s amazing! You get to lie on an actual couch and talk and talk. He doesn’t try to impale you or gouge out your eyeballs, or tell you how dirty you are. He’s so gentle! He doesn’t even slice off bits of you to snack on while you cry.”

“Well, then,” I say, stepping on her foot, the least cruel thing I could think of at that moment, because a part of me still wants to be thought of as ‘nice.’ “What does he get out of it?”

“Who cares? All I have to do is just lie down, like someone who’s really suffering, on his fancy leather couch while he tries every trick in his little therapist’s book. I cry buckets, like somebody who’s just arrived.”

She looks down at my boot crushing her foot.

“And then?” I ask, shifting my weight just a bit.

“Each time I go I make SO much progress, but I NEVER get any better. And I don’t just come back once a week: I’m there every single day. I think that’s the part that’s supposed to bother him.”

She takes a breath. “You can lean into it,” she says. “I won’t tell anyone what sort of person you are.”

It’s always bracing, at first, when you get here, doing something bad to another person. Everyone wants you to like what is happening to you, with the intention that you will get to feel like you deserve that feeling. Like it's the ice cream you're supposed to get after doing your chores.

“What if we take turns seeing him?” I ask, because I’d like a taste too. “That way he never gets any time off. And then there would be two people who never get any better.”

The lady who really knows me is just cracking up; she thinks my idea is so funny. The two of us go; there’s the longest line, because everyone around here is just in so much pain I guess, and a lot of them are laughing too, like they’re each going to get a big bowl of ice cream for making the therapist suffer. But soon, I’m on the couch. He barely asks one or two questions when everything pours out of me: the aching agonies, the guilt, the hate.

So much progress!

I’m in a ball, weeping, on that cool, comforting and soft leather couch, when the therapist gently gets on top of me, and he’s got one hand on my throat, and another one’s holding a syringe pointed straight at my eye. “You know what this is?” he says, as calm as a snake swallowing a rat. “All those terrible things inside you, that you choose to tell me: you think you’ll get even a moment’s peace for doing that, just for saying those things?

“Do you think,” he asks, “That they might give you some ice cream if all you do is let go?”

He shifts his weight on my body, shushing me as it starts to hurt.

“You have to work much harder than that,” he says.

I am so good at that moment. I hold very still while he plunges the syringe into my eye.