Sunday, 6/8/14 at 23:49.
Today I spent nearly all of my time with Lily grieving over the final loss of Anissa.
“I forgot what this feels like,” I confessed at one point. “I think I’ve experienced it only one other time, many years ago, before I became wealthy.”
Lily leaned back in her seat. “What?”
“Heartbreak. I think that’s what this is – that terrible, dull ache that you just sit with, knowing that the person you felt inexplicably close to, who often even seemed like an extension of you, is suddenly gone. Out of reach. That human being who completed you and made you better is suddenly paired up with someone else for a different destiny, leaving you alone to search out yours just when you thought you had found it. That same person is now so completely tied to someone else that your messages and phone calls now produce a dreaded awkwardness rather than an exciting joy. It’s a terrible emptiness. The only consolation is maybe the realization that you can feel that way about someone, but it’s always drowned out by the knowledge that it could take years to find someone else who makes you feel that way, if you’re even lucky enough to get a second chance.”
Lily looked genuinely empathetic. “I’m sorry to hear that this has been so hard on you.”
“Me too. The emotional impact really took me by surprise – another indication of how rare it is for me to feel this way about someone. And, absurdly enough, there’s a kind of butterfly effect from all of this that’s causing me to act selfishly towards another living creature.”
She furrowed her brow at my admittedly cryptic confession. “What do you mean?”
“Well, four days ago, right after Anissa had come to my office, my veterinarian for Icarus told me that he’s well enough to fly and fend for himself in the wild again. But I just can’t bring myself to set him free. I’ve grown used to sharing my bedroom with the little guy and, now that Anissa is definitely out of the picture, I feel all the more attached to this small bird for some reason... I know that I’m being terribly selfish by keeping him in that cage, now that I’ve nursed him back to health. And I feel awful about it, but I just can’t let him go.”
“Maybe that’s because Anissa was a kind of Icarus for you.”
“She definitely was.”
“What about the other aspects of your life, Julien? Doesn’t the success of that distressed asset deal you mentioned help to balance out your mood a little?”
“No, it doesn’t. On the contrary – thinking about that only reminds me of what I’ve lost because it was thoughts of Anissa that had prompted me to give away half of my personal profit from that deal.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize that you had done that,” she replied. “That was very nice of you.”
“After you get past that level of comfort that lots of money can buy, wealth has the fading appeal of beauty – to others and even to yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“As the cliché goes, find me a stunningly beautiful woman, and I’ll find you a guy who’s bored of fucking her. In the same way, if you find me an obscenely wealthy husband, I’ll find you a wife who thinks he doesn’t have enough money. And that probably makes him feel the same way in the end. But not Anissa – she was remarkably and genuinely different, and would never fall into that pattern.”
“I thought you worried at times that she was using you for your wealth.”
“Yes, but even when I thought that, I never suspected that she was attracted to my money for her own personal benefit. She’s not some gold-digging materialist who insatiably chases brand names and luxurious comforts. Any pressure I ever felt from Anissa to spend money only made me a better person – because it was always for a good cause.”
“And you don’t think you’ll find someone else with her values?”
“I might. But I don’t know if she’ll hold my interest in the same way.”
Lily gave me a playful but genuine smile. “Well, for what it’s worth, I couldn’t care less about brand names and luxurious comforts, and would choose philanthropy over consumerism any day of the week.”
Lily didn’t have to use herself as an example. And yet she did. Sometimes the subtext screams louder than spoken words. I felt tempted to take her right there and then, in her office, maybe on her desk – if only just to get over Anissa and finally confirm, in a very definitive and assertive way, that Lily and I were going to go there, whatever the consequences might be to her license or our professional relationship. It would be therapeutic in a way that no amount of therapy could be: it would make me realize that Anissa was replaceable and not some impossibly unique angel whose loss I was doomed to mourn for the rest of my life. But something held me back. All I could bring myself to do was flirt a little. “I knew there was a reason I liked you,” I remarked with a wink, feeling very unsatisfied with the results of my self-control. “But let’s not overstate your asceticism when I tripled your hourly rate to see me on Sundays.”
She smiled at the invitation to banter a little. “That’s not a measure of my materialism, Julien – that’s just how much I value my days off. This is not exactly play time for me.”
My mouth formed an exaggerated frown. “It’s not? You mean I’m a pain in the ass for you – a job that you have to tolerate to pay the bills?”
“Well, you are a pain in the ass when it comes to extracting anything about your childhood.”
“I guess you should be paid extra just for the patience involved in that thankless process. It’s almost as hard as the job of a dentist trying to perform a root canal on a cat surrounded by moving mice.”
She nodded in knowing amusement. “Actually, I think giving that cat a root canal would be easier.”
“Unfortunately, that’s probably truer than ever, because my motivation to tackle my past has now fallen significantly. Of course, I still care about resolving the issue someday, and I’m aware that it’s something that I need to do at some point, but there’s no urgency now.”
“Even if I prove to you with photos that I visited a slaughterhouse?”
“Well, a deal is a deal. So I will honor the terms of my challenge to you, but I just don’t know how deeply I’ll be prepared to explore the related issues with you. It’s really something that I try to think about as little as possible.”
“I can certainly understand that. And I guess you’ll have to understand if we end up reaching an impasse and therapy is no longer productive.”
Lily looked up at the clock on the wall, and I knew from her expression that our time was up. “Yes, I know that’s a possibility,” I conceded, tilting my head to the side a little and raising an eyebrow. “Look, if there were a love interest at stake, my motivation to plunge into the darkness would probably be a lot greater.”
My sexy therapist stood up and I followed her to the door, which she opened.
“We always end up here, don’t we, Julien?” she noted, staring into my eyes.
I looked back into her blue irises, and had to summon all of my willpower not to take her into my arms and ravish her mouth. The temptation was all the more powerful because of how cleverly she had timed her rhetorical question: “We always end up here, don’t we?” That question literally referred to the exact physical spot where we awkwardly and reluctantly said goodbye at the end of every session together. And “here” also referred to our ongoing dilemma about whether she could be that love interest for me – a dilemma that made ending up here, at the door, all the more electrifying.