I am a therapist. Some areas of employment involve hourly wages, pay per pound of potatoes picked, a fixed salary. I get paid by the tear. Well, per fluid ounce, really. I push my patients as they sit or lay before me, I poke and prod at their deepest and most painful memories. The further in, the more repressed, the more forgotten these emotions are, the more the tears drop. The more my money flows.
This one looks like a particularly fruitful goldrush. So strange to see how she folds each tissue, blotting first her right cheek, then her left, carefully, as though not wanting to wrinkle neither her face nor the cheap sandpapery material. Then she rotates the spotted tissue ninety degrees counterclockwise, folds a dry part down, and creases, as though covering, then burying, her tears that moisten the once-dry tissue. She runs her nails across the edge, head cocked awkwardly to the right, staring blankly, intently, passively, as though thinking about her response to my last question, particularly painful.
"Do you think you are ready to stop these things that are hurting you?" I had vaguely asked, just before her face tightened up, the creases forming across her once-model-like features now squishing her into a play-doh-like figurine. The cartoon face before me accompanies a body that squirms uncomfortably in the office chair (but not because of the seating quality, for I always make sure to select the finest of the options offerred within the small catalog allowed to my colleagues and me). Her chest and shoulders expand with shocking tenseness; at first I think she is inhaling, but now I know she is not. The expanding motion reaches a sudden stop, like a mechanical latch whose gear slowly, repetitively, rotates its position. Sliding, sliding, sliding towards the edge, then clicking back downwards into the original position.
Not quite squirming, I suppose.
She carefully piles up the folded, soggy tissues, each forming a small, tight block, set aside only once she determined that the imbued creases couldn't repeat themselves further. She stacks them upon her tiny notebook (a Moleskin, perhaps), as though constructing a wall, a fort to represent the progress towards overcoming whatever it is that happened to her.
She has only ever spoken to me in metaphors, and often answers my questions with more questions. This time she does both: "What if it's something that still happens?" She pauses, click-breathing for a moment, blotting and folding tears away, before answering in a small child's voice: "Like, when you're little and you're learning to tie your shoes, and someone in your class throws mud in your hair while you're half-squatted, half-kneeling in the playground. You don't get mud in your hair every time you tie your shoes for the rest of your life, but a lot of those times .... you think about that time that kid you thought was your friend was mean to you in front of the whole class, and then the embarrassment is back .... or you worry that someone else, someone new, might come and throw mud in your hair .... or you think that, even though everything tells you that this person really is your friend, you worry that they might have stuck something in your hair while you weren't looking, and then everyone else knows that they're making fun of you... everyone knows but you."
She was probably raped as a child. Or maybe the captain of the football team slept with her, told her they were going to be together forever, and then laughed about it at practice. And she recently found out the truth.
I am certain that my college professors would all tell me that the human psyche is not so simple, not so straightforward. I am also certain that this fort of soggy tissue-bricks means that I will be able to buy myself a cool new pair of sneakers this weekend. Though a part of me worries that I will think back on her sadness, her internal battle, each time I kneel down to tie them.
I pause, laces in hand, lift my head slowly, and look around. Even though nobody is in sight, I rush to finish tying them, and run a hand through my hair as I walk out of the shoe store.
