By Kelsey Crow

“And so I came out of the bathroom after taking a shower and he was sitting in his kitchen on one of the barstools reading my diary. Just had it in his hands, looking down at it with his stupid face like he wasn’t violating me in the worst way possible.” She folded her hands on her knees and sat back deeper into the couch in the therapist’s office. She stared at him unblinkingly.

The therapist was a man in his late fifties with thin silver glasses. He had most of his hair left and it was combed neatly to one side. His face looked average. Average level of handsomeness, average kindness, average intelligence. He wore a brown plaid button-up shirt and a cream sweater vest.

She hated brown; it was so rural and boring.

“I can imagine how horrible that must have felt,” the therapist said.

“Well yeah,” she said. “I write some really personal shit in there. Plus, he would have had to like, open my backpack and root around all my textbooks and clothes to find it. Such a premeditated act. It’s not like I just leave it lying around on the counter when I spend the night. Or ever.”

“What did you do?” said the therapist.

She raised her eyebrows. “What did I do? I grabbed it out of his hands and hit him in the face with it as hard as I could. It’s a hardback notebook, you know.”

The therapist looked at her with a mixture of compassion and wonder. “That’ll do some damage,” he said.

“Yeah, I hope I gave him a black eye,” she said. “I wouldn’t know. I left pretty soon after that and I haven’t seen him since. The fucker. I hope I did some permanent retinal damage or something.”

“Really?” the therapist said. “Do you really wish you’d done permanent damage?”

“Of course I do,” she said, her eyes defiant. “I’m pretty sure he traumatized me for life; I want him to be a little damaged too. My diary is like my ‘happy place.’ And now that doesn’t even feel safe anymore.” She shook her head.

The therapist frowned slightly and shifted positions in his swivel chair. “I don’t think ‘objective’ is the right word… I guess matter-of-fact is better. You’re being remarkably matter-of-fact about your emotional reaction to all this.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying I’m not being natural or something? I’m intellectualizing things too much?”

“Would you forgive me if I said you might be?”

“No.”

They stared at each other for several seconds.

“So what did he do after you hit him with the notebook? Did he try to explain away what he was doing? Apologize?”

“Nope,” she said. “Want to know what he said?” She paused, watching the therapist scribble on his clipboard.

He looked up. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Can you blame me?’”

“Wow,” the therapist said. “Interesting. He’s got some nerve.”

She shook her head again and pressed her lips together. “I mean; that’s what I liked about him in the first place. His nerve. He always just goes right to the heart of the matter with what he says. He doesn’t have a filter like most people. He’ll just ferret out the raw, tender spot and push on it. It’s infuriating. But it’s also exciting. And sexy.”

“Do you have a history of self-destruction?” the therapist said.

“Do I what?”

“I was just thinking that you liking that quality about him sounds a little self-destructive.”

She cocked her head. “I’ve never harmed myself or had an eating disorder or anything. But you may have a point there. I like people who are… dangerous. Exciting. Who technically have the power to hurt me if they really wanted to. Otherwise they’re not interesting, you know? Like, what’s even the point?”

The therapist looked down at his clipboard again and started writing.

“What are you writing?” she said.

He looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“I don’t know, why not? Does it violate some sort of patient protocol to tell me what you’re writing about me on your little clipboard?”

He considered her for a moment. “Do you feel a need to control social situations or else they won’t turn out how you want them to?”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know, maybe. The truth is, I like dangerous people because I feel like I’m dangerous and I want someone who can sort of be my match.”

“How would you say you’re dangerous?” the therapist asked.

“Well,” she said. “I can usually read people like books and I’m really good on my toes in a conversation. I ask good questions.” She paused. “I guess that’s not really dangerous, though. I guess I’d say I’m good at being sarcastic and asking really sharp questions that are loaded and definitely not small talk.”

“That sounds like defense to me, not offense,” he said. “The sarcasm is a shield and the questions could be red herrings to throw the person off your trail.”

She chewed her lip and narrowed her eyes. “Hmm.”

“Hmm what?”

She was silent for a bit. “So now are you going to ask me why I feel the need to put up defenses?”

“I was thinking about it,” the therapist said. “But there was another question I was considering too.”

“What is it?”

“Well. What happened after he said, ‘Can you blame me?’ I’m sorry, but I’m fascinated.”

“That’s alright. You can be fascinated. I guess that’s kind of a compliment, that I’m living a fascinating life.”

“That’s one way to put it,” he said.

“Do you want to find out what happened or what?” she said. She crossed her arms. “I feel like you’re just denigrating the fascinating status of my life now. I think it’s fascinating and that’s what’s most important.”

“I would like to know what happened,” the therapist said. He took his glasses off and cleaned them on the hem of his shirt without breaking eye contact.

“Okay. Well, I sort of tried to hit him again, with my fist. And he just grabbed my wrists and put them behind me and I thought I was going to pop a blood vessel and have an aneurism or something.” She shook her head and took a breath. “He’s really strong. He works out at the gym a lot and he has these really huge arm and shoulder muscles. Usually I find it sexy, I mean, we’ve had rough sex and done like the rape fantasy thing and it’s super hot. But it was so frustrating—infuriating, actually—to be overpowered in a way that I wasn’t actually wanting to be overpowered in. You know? So I screamed at him that he was a fucking bastard and to let me go. I think then he realized just how pissed I was because he actually started apologizing. He let me go and sort of held his hands up, ready to block any punches or something. Then I felt like a switch was flipped inside me and I just turned away from him and started putting my clothes on and I put my diary back in my backpack and the whole time he was all apologetic and grabbing at me. And he’d driven me to his place, but I just left and took the bus back home and blocked his number as soon as I sat down in the bus.”

“Well. That’s a story,” the therapist said.

“Yep.”

“And you haven’t talked to him since?”

“Nope.”

“Was the… relationship—“

“It wasn’t a ‘relationship.’ I don’t do relationship-relationships. It was like a friends with benefits thing.”

“Alright. How was the friends with benefits relationship before this happened? That’s a pretty insensitive thing to do, has he always been like this?”

“Not really. But now that I think about it, I feel like I should have seen it coming.”

“How so?”

“The reading the diary thing. So a few months ago, we were doing work in a coffee shop together and I was asking him if he ever wrote in a diary. He’s a really technical kind of person and not super in touch with his emotions and I was telling him how helpful writing in a diary can be. And he said he didn’t think he would be comfortable doing that because people could find it and read it. And I told him he could write in like a Word document on his Mac, because laptops are password protected. But he was still pretty ambivalent about it.”

She shook her head. “Man. I really should have taken the whole ‘people can read your diary’ thing a little more seriously.” She leaned down and pulled her water bottle from her backpack and took a drink.

The therapist wrote in his clipboard while she downed half the water bottle. “Why do you think he read your diary?” he asked after she put her water bottle on the wooden side table next to the couch.

She pulled a piece of lint off her black leggings. “Well he’s always asking me what I’m thinking. He told me once that he knows I have a lot of thoughts. And sometimes when he asks me what I’m thinking, I’ll actually tell him what I’m thinking. But not very often. More like, I won’t say anything at all—or I’ll tell him stuff, but I can tell that he can tell it’s not what I was really thinking about. So he was probably trying to solve the ‘mystery of me’ or something.”

“Hmm,” the therapist said. “Perhaps he was actually trying to do something good by reading your diary. Trying to understand you. Strengthen the friends-with-benefits,” he made air quotes with his fingers, “relationship.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You sure changed your tune fast. You on his side now or something?”

“No, I’m just exploring possible scenarios and trying to look at it from a different angle. Nobody’s perfect.” He paused and put his hands in his lap. “You know, demonizing somebody usually hurts you more than it hurts the person being demonized.”

She dug around in her purse and pulled out a tube of chapstick. She applied it to her lips, glaring at him. “Of course,” she said. “Of course it does. Because it shows how much you care—like how love and hate come from the same place and all that? A place of emotion and ‘caring.’ Sure. Cool. That’s me. The person who always cares too much. Or at least more than the other person.”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down. Let’s break that down—”

“Sweet. Sounds like so much fun.”

The therapist took a deep breath and gave her a little smile. “Nobody ever said therapy was supposed to be fun, you know,” he said. “Usually it’s the opposite. But it can help.”

“Maybe.”

“I’d say there’s a better chance than ‘maybe.’”

“Probably depends on how good your therapist is.” She looked at him steadily. “Or how not good.”

“You seem awfully defensive for coming here of your own volition.”

“I didn’t come here of my own volition.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I made an appointment with you because I made the mistake of telling my dad that I sort of wished I was dead. Not that I wanted to kill myself, just that I wanted to be dead slightly more than I wanted to be alive. It’s like an intellectual, quality of life kind of thing. And then he got really worried and told me to see a therapist and I kept putting it off and then he threatened to cut off his financial support if I didn’t start seeing a therapist regularly. I mean; it’s not like I’ve graduated college and have a real job or anything yet—so… here I am.”
“I see,” the therapist said. He blinked and wrote something on his clipboard. “Would you say you’ve been depressed lately?”

She bit her lip and looked at the bookcase against the wall. “I don’t know. I guess ever since summer ended and school started back up, everything has seems a lot less glittery and a lot more… gray.”

“Less glittery and more gray?”

“Well, this summer was just so great—I was back home and with all my old friends and everything felt so slow and easy and connected—and then I came back to ‘real life’ and I hate that whole ‘back to real life’ feeling. It’s awful.”

“Everybody hates that feeling.”

“Not everybody hates it as much as I do. It’s just, whenever something is over, I get this pit at the bottom of my stomach and it feels like everything is over, even though it’s not. But it still feels like it. That’s when things seem more gray. Plus, my best friend graduated and now she’s teaching English in Bucharest, Romania.”

“Wow, good for her,” the therapist said.

“Yeah. Good for her.” She said the words bitterly and then blushed, rubbing her arms with her hands and looking guilty.

“You said your dad was concerned about you,” the therapist said, touching the tip of the pen lightly to his chin. “What about your mom?”

She took a deep breath. “She um, died when I was eight.”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well…”

“So it was just you and your dad growing up? Or did you have any siblings?”

“I have one brother. But he’s basically a clone of my dad so I might as well have been growing up with only one other person. Here, you know what?” She pulled her iPhone out of her purse. “I have a quote from C.S. Lewis that will describe my dad perfectly to you.”

The therapist nodded. He scribbled more on his clipboard while she tapped on her iPhone, pulling up the quote. He took a sip from a mug of water on his desk.

“Okay, here it is,” she said. “It’s from his book Four Loves: ‘To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.’”

She pressed the lock button on her iPhone and put it back in her purse. “Yeah, the second half of that quote is basically my dad,” she said. “It’s not pretty.”

She looked down at her lap, suddenly deflated.

The therapist’s lower lip softened in sympathy. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Your father doesn’t sound very emotionally supportive.”

“No, he wasn’t,” she said, still looking down at her lap. “He never was and he’s trying to be now, but it’s too late. I already hate him. I can’t help it. You know what?” She looked up from her lap. “I had a dream about him a couple weeks ago. So a little backstory, he remarried for the first time last year—and she was a total witch, the worst person I’ve ever met. Anyways, he was on high blood pressure medication and she was suicidal and on anti-depressants and he finally divorced her and got away with most of his savings intact. So now he’s sort of in a ‘new-lease-on-life’ phase, and that’s great for him and all. But anyways, I had a dream that he was diagnosed with brain cancer and he was so sad and mad. I’ve never seen him like that in real life. He’s always so cold and passive and emotionless. But in the dream, he was so heart-broken and I was so sad that he was going to die soon. And then I woke up and I felt really sad, but that didn’t make me hate him any less. I wish it did. But you can’t be guilted into not hating someone anymore.”

The therapist nodded and then glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Time’s up.”

She craned her neck to see the clock behind the bookcase. Her shoulders slumped and she looked at him with big saucer eyes for a second before nodding and getting up from the couch. She bit her lip while she zipped up her coat and put her backpack on.

“Does this same time work for you next week?” the therapist said.

She slung her green cross-body purse over her shoulders and picked up her water bottle. “Um, yeah,” she said.

The therapist wrote the day and time on a little brown business card and handed it to her. “I’ll see you next week then,” he said.

She nodded and hesitated in the doorway. They stared at each other for a few seconds. She opened her mouth and then closed it. “Yeah, see you next week,” she said, and left the room.

The therapist sat looking at the couch for several moments after she left. He wrote down one last thing on his clipboard and began preparing for his next patient.