SPECTERS

In my then journal I wrote about my therapy with Helen:

“There was a moment when understanding failed irrevocably, when, bonded until then by a united effort, we split apart like a fractured atom.

“That trim little woman with her wide, scrubbed face, close cap of red hair and mannered courtesy. I believed in her impersonal good will, relied on her unflagging cheerfulness, clung to her awkwardly, like a child of one species to an adult of another.

“For a year and more, I sat on the green vinyl seat of a metal institutional chair beside a small aquarium. Minute blue striped fish zigzagged in confinement, like my thoughts. She was always strange to me, and I felt closer to her one foot beyond her door than closed in behind it. I used to prop my feet up on that chair, knees to chin, bind my legs in an embrace, and try to feel as secure as I did perched on a pillow in my own bedroom.

“Though she sat only a few feet away at a desk with a folder that bore my name, that narrow space between us was daunting—perilous somehow—and I could rarely span it with a gaze. Instead I stared in another direction—at a poster on the wall—and saw a seashore with an aqua wave, when I was able to see anything at all beyond the specters that my own psyche raised.”