There was the time my bike shorts and thighs
stuck to the chair and I cried
because the skin adhered during my 50 minutes,
but you thought I was (at last) tearful
instead of sitting saying nothing (which of course is
not nothing but something).
There was the time when I told the story—
beginning, middle, end—of my son’s rape,
the damage marked by the pediatrician,
clinical drawings I did not wish to see.
There was the time you finally spoke and said,
You need to think of something to eat.
That was the entire session—the two of us
coming up with something
I could fathom eating. No surprise to find us
settling on food of our respective youths;
dark pumpernickel bagel, cream cheese schmear,
lox bright as sorrow, bright as the birds
of paradise, purple phlox, gaudy begonias
that appeared each week in your cylindrical vase.
(Or, I assumed the vase was yours, even though
I learned we ought never to make assumptions.
That they kill relationships, strip them of conversation,
bloat the silence. That’s what I got most from the sessions,
how crucial the collecting of words.)
But also there was the time you fell asleep
right in front of me. Hilarious because I was afraid
of being boring. And because of that fear,
I cherry-picked stories—my grandmother’s vitriol
despite her enormous vegetable harvest,
my husband’s heart like some remote island
I had heard of but couldn’t place on a map.
There you were nodding off
even when I last-ditch effort told about an erotic dream.
The stalker I’d had maybe or some other
long-gone man. Snore. Head lilting.
And the worst part? You never apologized.
Who sleeps during a confession?
Was it warm in the room, my husband offered.
Can you blame a guy in a warm room, 3 o’clock?
Don’t our bodies instinctually shut down then,
remembering the child we’d been, napping?
(My therapist friend told me shutting down,
sleeping, drifting are topics discussed in training.
We study this, he said, Because when we cut out—
that says something about us. About you? I asked.
How is it about you? Just who is paying for what here?)
And there was the time I saw another author
in the waiting room. On stain-resistant chairs
we plotted a story we would never write.
Imagine: all writers see the same person,
tell the same sorrows, so that someone—you—
will gather our words and make them
into something that resembles hope.
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