The beach (unfinished)

I have nightmares. That I'm relaxing on a deserted beach somewhere, and a gaggle of scantily-clad women bound over and begin dancing for me, and one of them, the most provocatively-yet-conservatively dressed, not like the others, whispers in my ear that she'd like me to take her to bed. My therapist suggests this doesn't sound like a nightmare at all, it sounds, rather, like a rather pleasant dream. She suggests that the nightmare of it is not the dream itself but the waking from it back into my small bed with its limp, soggy sheets in my dreary, lightless apartment. When she says this, I think that my therapist doesn't know me very well. But I don't say this, I just say "yeah ok" and she nods with a very self-satisfied look on her face like she has successfully asserted her dominance over me. And then I talk about work or whatever until the session ends.

I can't afford the therapist, strictly speaking. I mean, I don't have the money to pay her. So what I do is, I give her increasingly large checks, for money owed plus an equal amount into the future "to ensure this doesn't happen again," which I know will bounce. But by the time they bounce, I've already gotten another session or two in, and then I can just give her an even larger check, to "compensate [her] for the inconvenience." The amount on the last check I wrote was somewhere over $16,000. It strains credulity, somewhat, that I, who at one time had less than $100 in my checking account, resulting of the bouncing of even my very first check, would suddenly have the $16,000+ necessary for this latest check to clear. But she goes along with it, every time. I suppose the upside is too enticing, or perhaps it's the downside, the pain of cutting your losses with all those sessions unpaid for, all those debts forgiven, that is the stronger motivation. Regardless, I think her advice is beginning to suffer, as if she's holding our her best analysis until I'm paid up. She recently suggested I indulge in my suicidal ideation of wading into the river and letting the fast-moving current drag me out to sea. She said it would "relieve [me] of [my] fear of rivers." (I confessed to no such fear and, in fact, have none.) When I mentioned idly reading a news article about a brutal war in some distant country to which I have no connection, she said, "you should go there." She didn't even pretend to offer any purported therapeutic benefit to traveling to an active warzone, she just said, "it will be fine." Of course, if I die in a war, she'll lose all hope of ever being paid, but I think her ultimate goal is something else, something more abstract, or maybe it's less abstract, and maybe she just hates me.

One good piece of advice she did give me, though, was to call you again. Even as the quality of her other advice diminished, she kept encouraging me to give you another chance, her enthusiasm for the idea only growing as I fell deeper and deeper into the red. She convince me that you've changed and matured since the last time we spoke, probably, and that it was "very unlikely" you would continue to exploit my feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy as you did in the past to dominate me psychologically, steal my money, make me quit various jobs that did not accord with your vision of the lifestyle you wanted, etc.

And I've changed too. I've made a lot of progress. I no longer feel compelled, I think, to tell lies about your sexual history to our mutual friends, your co-workers, my mother, etc. My therapist says she "think[s] it is unlikely" I will again burst into your office, scream "MARY FUCKS DOGS, SHE CHEATED ON ME WITH A DOG" at everyone, grab the phone and try to figure out how to make an officewide announcement on the P.A. system, be wrestled to the ground by two small receptionists working together, attempt to commit "suicide by cop" by rushing an unarmed security guard, and collapse into a heap and sob and apologize the moment I see your mortified face when you rush out to see the commotion -- she says the chances of that happening are "under 25 percent." And that I should give you a call and see how it goes, because, "what's the worst that could happen?" Which isn't analysis, I realize, but I think it is meant to be a kind of rhetorical device to make me be like, yeah, sure, I'll give her a call.

Do you remember when we went to the beach together? It was one of our good times, one of our last good times. I hadn't found out that you'd emptied my savings account to pay off your credit card, and you hadn't found out that I'd mailed a letter detailing several made-up sexual encounters involving you and our neighbor to your night school professor. It was cold so we kept our coats on but we took off our shoes and we stood in the sand and felt millions of years of obliterated rocks between our toes. We looked out at the waves and we started to argue about where the car was parked. Was it important, then? Faced with that heaving, immovable ocean pushing in, did it matter whether we'd parked in the main lot or the auxiliary lot, especially when there was no actual disagreement as to where the car was, just what the exact designation of the lot was on the official Beach Map posted near the snack bar? I've thought about it a lot, in the months I've been without you, and what I've realized is that, yeah, of course it matters. We're only on this earth for so long, and what's more important than