My last therapist’s face never wrinkled for me. I saw her for years and in all our sessions I swear to you it didn’t wrinkle for me once.
But it did for someone else. I saw it happen that day, through the windows of the red Hyundai in the lane between us on the Ambassador bridge. And—turns out—her emotions have millions of muscles (or do her muscles have millions of emotions?). Little creases she kept hidden from me, but clearly not from everyone.
Okay. These are some of the things I feel when I put myself back there, back to that day:
- I feel the claustrophobia of my seatbelt around the squishy vest my aunt just sent me.
- I feel the blisters from the Doc Martens that refuse to break in even though everyone online says they should have by now.
- I feel my ears throbbing because I am blasting the 2009 Season 1 Glee soundtrack, but I am not singing along. (My windows are closed, not that she would notice me anyway. She is absorbed with all the wrinkle-makers inside her own car—a baby, a radio, a marriage, goldfish cracker dust.)
Our cars are at a standstill, hers slightly ahead so I can mostly see her profile except when she turns her head to the left. I take frequent breaks, just like she taught me to do whenever thinking about something too much raises my heartrate. It really works. I do ten seconds looking out my other window, where I can see the crashing Detroit River underneath us. I’ve always found ferocity soothing. Little sips of fresh air for the eyes before turning back to her car. Their car.
Her wife is hidden in the driver’s seat, but their baby—the one that made her miss five of our sessions—is on full display, half-regurgitated orange crud coating its fragile skin. I see her hands appear, tending to that sticky sleeping worm. I take a mental screenshot, then I erase the sticky worm so I’m left with just her hands, floating against a greenscreen scintillating with potential. Staring at those hands brings me back to the me that I only find when I’m with her.
I swear watching her hands every week was magic. It really was. When I watched her hands, my bones felt palpable. Like I could redo high school and every restaurant gig and interview and degree and funeral, could redo them all as someone that people say things about, things like, “Oh, her? Yeah, sure. I know her.” I could redo them all from the fake leather couch she never joined me on.
The traffic begins to move. But then it turns out to be just that domino tightening of the small gaps between cars. Her wife—clearly so enlightened—does not participate in this petty ritual. She probably sleeps with a diffuser and makes terrific coffee. I stroke the curve of my steering wheel. Their baby wakes up just as my phone goes off, and for a second I think I am the cause. And I feel guilty for calling it a worm and for some of the other thoughts I’ve had about it. I ignore my phone for the fifth time. Or maybe the sixth. I’m not sure if you want that much detail. I know it’s my boyfriend Andrew asking me where I am and when I’ll be back and apologizing for the fact that he’s starting to worry a bit. And asking should he make dinner for both of us and adding that he will just in case.
The drivers around us are now making impulsive micro movements en masse as they begin to feel their hours dripping out of their tailpipes. Except for me, because now that we are stopped I dread the moment that we move, the moment I get to the border crossing without my passport, the moment I scramble to think of an excuse when all I want to do is scream because her car will move ahead and away and I’ll never know why they decided to drive across the bridge to the states during rush hour instead of driving straight home from the office like they usually do.
Well, every few weeks they do take a detour to the grocery store but mostly they just head home. Their street is utopic, easy for me to slow down and see them get out of their car. No one notices me. But I can never slow down enough to see them open the front door, even though my car is so commonplace it could almost disappear.
—
Things feel harmless when you get away with them.
What things, she said to me, what things feel harmless?
Her magic hands were in her lap while the space on the fake leather couch next to me yawned. So I said, faking orgasms. I couldn’t read her reaction, her face remained soft and smooth as ever. To be honest—not trying to flex—I have never faked an orgasm. But it felt harmless to say it. Harmless and maybe inviting?
She came over and stroked my hair behind my ear. New nerve endings sprang out of every pore of my body. I said, what are you doing? And she said, you are supposed to write down the dreams you have, remember?
So then of course I woke up, Andrew’s gentle breathing there to calm me, and diligently wrote the dream down, that’s why I remember it now. But it wasn’t worth it, because after writing the dream down I never got back to it. Which is probably what she had planned.
The first time I followed them home after a session was just a few days after my first date with Andrew. It’s worth noting, even though it’s basically unrelated. Maybe that’s where I should have started? It was early fall, and her wife was just beginning to show. The small curve under her cotton dress made my joints ache. I guess I had a surge of confidence after the date, which had been a total slam dunk. When they got in their car and hadn’t noticed me watching them, it felt like a home cooked meal. I pulled out of the parking lot when they did and started the Wednesday routine.
—
I only ever missed one Wednesday after that and it was to meet Andrew’s mom for the first time. Since I don’t have one myself it seemed like a good idea to meet his. We drove to Timmins for the day to see her and I guess you could say it went really well:
- I feel the crunchy corduroy of what she ridiculously calls a chesterfield.
- I feel the flat ginger ale lollygagging over my tongue.
- I feel her voice scraping dead skin off my shoulders.
I don’t hang out in boomer houses much these days, ever since my aunt moved back to England, and the air has a different density. The first time his mom leaves the room, after about an hour of chowing down on all my best jokes, Andrew whispers: This never happens. I know he hasn’t introduced a girlfriend to her since high school, but still his eyes mist at me when he says it. She comes back and asks Andrew if he would run out and get the mascarpone she forgot to buy for dinner and, in the same breath, if I want to go for a walk while he is out. He doesn’t admit to not knowing what mascarpone is and so is gone a while.
The neighbourhood is quiet, everything so spread out, like low-fat mayonnaise. The memory-graveyard tour she has planned for me begins right away. This is where Andrew broke his first bone in grade three, she says, trying to look at me like she is already experiencing this moment as a future memory.
Where? I scan the sidewalk and front lawns.
Right there, tripping on his shoelace. And this was Andrew’s first school, this was where he pretended to store his pretend spaceship, this was where his babysitter lived, oh and this used to be an ice cream store, the kind where you add your own sprinkles.
She keeps going and I recall my favourite Adam Sandler movie as a teenager. Sandler’s character, Robbie, finishes teaching an at-home piano lesson to his ninety-something-year-old student, Rosie. Rosie disappears into the kitchen as Robbie packs up, then she returns with a cooking pot, her face a tickle trunk of wrinkles, little seams threatening to burst with emotion. Hold out your hands, Rosie says, and spoons saucy homemade meatballs into them, undeterred as he weakly protests. Take a bite, she beams, so I can watch you enjoy them. That’s my favourite part.
I walk beside Andrew’s mom with all these memories dripping out from between my fingers and I wonder what she imagines I am going to do with them.
She pauses before her finale: This is where Andrew said “mommy” for the first time. And as she says it, I can hear the little voice ringing in my ears, at first sweet and then taunting. I meet her gaze for the first time. Her eyes are whispering: Take a bite.
—
How do you get out of bed in the morning? I ask Andrew one day, a few Tuesdays after we move in together, it might have been the day before the Ambassador bridge. Like what percentage is muscles or habit or responsibility or a genuine craving to do the day? If the way you get out of bed is a movie, what movie would it be?
He has an important meeting that day, he told me everything about it the night before. He looks beautiful when he is anxious, the ends of his hair poking around the air, echoing his multiplying thoughts. There is barely any light coming through the windows yet, but inside of him he is already a whole little world. He doesn’t come up with a movie, so I forge ahead:
You know, sometimes I wonder if everything we do is dictated by the way we wake up. Maybe these morning moments—when the sound of your coffee machine butts into my dreams and dream-me looks at me-me with this competitive energy, like who’s gonna make the first move—maybe these moments are a microcosm of our entire day but they happen so quickly that it’s not easy to take control, to take control back from our subconscious who is sort of like a totalitarian God and every morning we wriggle around in His annoyingly cozy prison but most of the time all that wriggling does is give us a bit of exercise which only leads to being better at exercise. Maybe that’s why I hate going to yoga with you. I hate wriggling pointlessly.
I love living with your brain, he says, and kisses me and my brain on our cheek before grabbing his coffee and heading out the door.
—
I often anticipate I will act differently than I do. That’s probably something I could work on. Like, how everyone has been posting advice about what your options are, you know, if they ask to take your phone? I read several of those posts. But in the moment, I can’t remember anything specific. I just unlock it and hand it over. Then I wait for hours and hours in this dramatically drab room:
- I feel the raw edges of the metal chair
- I feel that vague awareness of something mouldy nearby
- I feel the weight of boredom squeezing my esophagus
I sit there waiting and wondering why I told the border guard the truth. Maybe if I hadn’t, I could have kept going to sessions with her and nothing would have changed. But right when he flexed his jaw muscles and asked for my passport, her car drove away from the other booth. So I momentarily stopped living in my body. And apparently my autopilot is quite frank.
I can tell you what I told him. The border guard. Basically just that the Wednesday routine had become such a comfort by that day. At first, I swear I didn’t even notice how their route was completely different. Because following them is not about taking the route they take, it’s about making a mental lasso around their license plate and submitting absolutely to their control. It’s meditative. Sorry, it was meditative. So I don’t feel like I meant to drive over the bridge any more than I really mean to put toothpaste on my toothbrush every night. I pick up my toothbrush and next thing I know it just happens. Imagine in that moment your toothpaste just doesn’t appear on the brush. Right? And so when I lost sight of her car, all the ways in which I was physically tethered to myself as a body evaporated. It really freaked me out.
So that’s pretty much why I wanted to find a therapist again and I thought your website had really comforting graphics. And I like this room. I like that I can see your face wrinkle for me while I talk—yes, like that! Just like that.
You know, my aunt used to say feelings are your friends, but I think they are more so your children. Because they misbehave, they keep you from sleeping, they can completely overthrow your day, and at some point you realize your whole life is oriented around them and you’re not really living for yourself anymore. Friends don’t do that.
I know our session is almost over, I actually like that you have that clock there. Maybe we can pick up from here next time. How are Thursdays for you?