Leafhoppers

Today I recall epic battles with an unseen enemy, some 25 years past. I remember conversations with convenient store strangers about my last name and finding footprints outside the bathroom window when I was 6 and the man of the house, but the face of the counselor escapes me. I remember that moment reading from my mother’s psychology book about identity and consciousness and thinking, ‘I am alive. This is who I am.’ I don’t remember what we talked about, or if the counselor was a man or a woman. Or what the room looked like, or how I felt or what questions I might have been asked.

I remember that my sister had different sessions, and she told me the secret was to tell them what they seemed to want to hear; to cry a little, but not too much. And to hold the giggles inside until you were well clear of the car. I remember seeing such horrible things before, questions that the counselor never even asked me about, because I certainly would have remembered talking about those things. Things that I spent years waiting to talk about, but it’s not the sort of thing you bring up on first dates and cross country trips with your study abroad mates. And I wonder where this person got his or her crib sheet. Because we could have made quick work of the hourly rate.

“You didn’t really want to kill yourself, though.”

“No. I shouldn’t have said it. I was just trying to upset her. That sure backfired.”

She didn’t want attention.

Clue #1
I notice that she’s not looking at me, not with eye contact. I can only guess I’ve been acting a little strange again.

‘Was it something I said?’

There’s no way to ask this without coming across as insecure, helpless, ignorant. But it has to be determined, because it will burrow underneath the surface of the skin like a leafhopper, probing for sap.

‘Was it something you heard?’ is always the better approach. That takes the onus off of you. Collective guilt is so much better when shared.

Clue #2
I ask him to draw the house, as he imagines it.

When you're a child, apparently, you think a hallway is a tunnel to another place entirely. You don't conceive that the living room is actually right next to the bedroom, that the two rooms actually share this wall, that this is why the yelling seems so close. If you were to draw a map of how you imagined your childhood home, it would be one room separated by a tunnel, with infinite space in between.

This is how I know that recreating those memories is an exercise in spatial futility.

Clue #3
The numbers get me coming and going, like train schedules. If Amtrak leaves Seattle headed south at 60 mph and another Amtrak leaves San Francisco headed north at 70 mph, how many people will die when the trains collide ‘cause the scenery is so wonderfully distracting at Crater Lake?

She doesn’t laugh at my story, even though I am in the top 2%, and I wonder, ‘How can I be so much more vain at 30 than I was at 18?’

I wonder.