Layers

1 Therapy London, February 1998 ‘I’m in a lift’, Eleni says to Laura towards the end of her Thursday morning session. ‘It goes up and up, it shrinks around me and then squeezes me out into the void, nobody there to catch me.’ ‘How many times have you had this dream?’ Laura mumbles, moisture making her eyes look like shiny leaves after the rain. ‘Ι don't remember, but it’s always the same. It started the night before I first walked into your room last October.’ Anyone who’s ever been to therapy for any more than six weeks will know that there are sessions that get forgotten as soon as you walk out of the door and those which get replayed in your mind like a broken record, in which the first three lines of the song are repeated again and again. Eleni would remember that session with Laura in mid-February, the boring week that came in following the excitement of her birthday, for years to come. What she could still not remember was the order that things happened or rather were said, as happenings in therapy take shape in words. Yet, her memory of that session consisted of snapshots pushing to the surface one by one, like bubbles allowing the sun in before bursting. In fact, there was hardly any sun at all that February day. By that time in her therapy, Eleni had taken to sitting on the large floor cushion, which she was not sure was meant for patients, but which Laura had consented to letting her use with a nod. Diagonally across from her, Laura was sitting in her slightly reclining therapist’s chair, and just above her head was the roof window, one of Eleni’s favourite features in Laura’s room. She always thought lofts were cosy, almost womb-like. Eleni lifted her gaze to the window so that she could discern a tiny sunray the colour of sickly yellow ochre. It was the first light she noticed that day, and it was past two o’clock. There must have been some silence, but she remembered her mood, the hopelessness of her obsession for Yves still ruining her mind. She must have complained about it, said something like, how come four months into the therapy and I am still thinking of an irrelevant loser that I will never ever be in love with? Would this symptom ever show any signs of improving? It must have been shortly after that, while trying to trace the sunray outside the window, when Laura said: ‘Well, perhaps now is your turn to ruminate over your father, a man who ruined so many women’s lives.’ Though Eleni did not get where this was coming from, she had no trouble recollecting the contempt for her father in Laura’s voice and how that led to all the other images creeping in. She told Laura how drunk she was that summer night in Paris when she had walked with Yves on shiny warm cobblestones with only as much as her slippers, shorts and T-shirt on; how she could not know then that that night would change her life for ever. That the encounter with Yves would take things away from her like her father had done to women in all his dangerous liaisons. Then she remembered the rustling leaves echoing in the empty studio after Nicolas had left for work that morning, and how she knew that he could not stand her depression, her writer’s block; how petrified she was that he would leave her and then nobody else would ever love her again. And yet, as Laura said, Nicolas’s impatience with her moods did not make her feel loved in the first place, did it? Floods of tears, it was one of those sessions, the floodgates had opened for good. When Eleni stood up, just about feeling her numb legs, crouched as she had been on the bean cushion, Laura came close, touching her shoulder lightly. ‘The lift no longer has to throw you out, now that you are coming to see me, I promise’, she mumbled. Eleni would remember the cracks in Laura’s voice for years to come. Yet, once she was out, coat wide open and gaze looking inwards, the wind stabbed her in the chest, and the void was there again.