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5:43 p.m. - 2001-06-24
The Rapist Session
Is it a coincidence that if you put a space into the word 'therapist', you come out with 'The Rapist?' Read on for this simple anecdote of a nearly true session from a few years ago, some details and names changed.

My inner corruption was a separate universe from the overstuffed couches and therapeutic squeeze balls. She watched while I built a block house, as I beat her in Chinese Checkers, as I drew her portrait in charcoal. The plain fact that I didn't automatically fix her facial flaws on her caricature caused frantic scribblings in the worn red notebook of hers. Hidden animosity, I suppose she thought, that I didn't erase the mole on her cheek, the flab on her arm, the way her stomach strained at the bodice of her dress. I didn't draw her smiling or posing, but just how she was; spilling out of the chair, gazing at me with hungry and morbid curiosity.

When she asked me how I felt when I drew, I asked her how she felt when she asked people to draw. She paused and then said, "Well, I like to see how other people see things." Not a bad answer, almost what I would have said myself, but the sarcasm was impossible to hold back for seventy bucks a session.

"You mean you want to suck the life out," I said. "Art isn't the same once it's been presumed upon. You know that when you're looking at my artwork, you're really looking for hidden emotions. What would you do if I told you that it was just art, simple and quick, a reproduction of the face here before me?"

"I don't think I'd believe that," she said. "Everything has hidden meanings."

"If a patient drew you a purple horse," I mused innocently, "then what would you write down in that notebook?"

"I wouldn't until I'd asked why he'd drawn the horse purple," she told me. "Horses aren't purple. Why purple, of all colors, to draw a horse? What is the significance of the color purple?"

I stared at her for a while, until she grew uncomfortable and looked away. "Why," I said quietly. "Why else would you draw a purple horse other than the simple reason that that's just what you happened to draw right at that moment?"

It was a novel concept to her, that something wouldn't have meaning.

We came to an impasse when she asked me about school and I proceeded to talk for eight sessions about Aidan, a seventeen-year-old silent mystery of the senior class who never said anything or did anything, but who I made out in my stories to be a sensational, flamboyant character. "Aidan did a striptease in history class today," I told her on the seventh straight session of extolling Aidan's pseudo-virtues. She was the walking dead by then, having heard more about this phantom boy than she'd ever wanted to know. "He got up on the table and just started taking things off. Shirt, pants, belt, the works. Mr. Kaplan called the dean up, but by the time she got there, Aidan had left his clothes and fled the classroom."

In between yawns, she weakly attempted to steer the conversation back to analytical topics, which was, after all, what she was being paid for. "Is there any part of Aidan that you might secretly idolize?" she asked tiredly.

"Hell no," I said, "he's completely whacked out. Why would I want to be screwed up for? Anyway, did I tell you what Aidan did on Wednesday?" It was gone, the fight between us that had gone on for ages. I was devoid of any interest and she wasn't interested in pushing me anymore.

She officially gave up the fight on July 7, 1999, the eighth straight session of complete bullshit about Aidan. She handed me over to my parents, offering only a few words of explanation. "Hannah doesn't pay attention to intraversion," she told my glowering mother. "She's completely detached, almost like she doesn't play a role in her own life. I think it's beyond my prowess to go any deeper."

She was probably correct; I was way beyond her prowess, given that I had no interest in getting better or confiding anything in a therapist. However, the inaccuracy of her diagnosis was almost ironic. I didn't detach myself from life; I detached myself from the mundane. Life, and with it, reality, was a different concept altogether. I drew almost everything from the imagination, and almost nothing from my surroundings. If anything, I was too self-absorbed. Stupid bitch.

 

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