Inventing a therapist

...And beginning to "build" birds

I was assigned to a real therapist who tapped her pencil a lot and kept brushing her bangs off her face. Except she didn’t have bangs. So I invented an Imaginary Therapist I liked a lot more. She asked me to describe myself. I said, I am a new arrival on this planet. And a wild raging ocean. And a ship tossed on the waves. And the wreckage on the shore.

She asked me what happened and I said I was hit by a truck. She asked me to say more so I added, “When the brain breaks, the legs don’t know what to do. Neither do the hands or the feet.

”They tested my head hundreds of times and found things had disappeared. Like the file that remembers locations and the part that integrates physical movements so I don’t fly down the steps or fall out of my chair. I take a step. A goal for my feet. I say a word. A goal for my head.

I got better, which meant I could now say letters of the alphabet with an impressive degree of accuracy. I just couldn’t read the words in which they appeared. I saw (or thought I saw,) “Thank you for your pitiful donation,” which really said “pivotal.

I also saw, or thought I saw, something about “depriving your partner of seeing your body in all its ludicrousness,” which really says, “depriving your partner of seeing your body in all its lusciousness.”

And me? I ranged between

Stripped

Ripped

Incoherent

Incandescent

Subsumed

And

Transcended.

Also confused and ashamed.

The outline of self-broken/erased.

Contents dissolved/unencased.

Footing? None. Anchor? Are you kidding?

I stared at screens for years, and saw battalions of gray-black words filing across, like unending trails of ants. They got bigger, then smaller, then bigger again. I couldn’t read or write. But I started building birds.