Baltimore by Jelena Lengold Page A

would prefer to forget because of the pain I feel every time I remember. Nice memories are better. And I always think: What did the people who came to live there do with the few walnuts they got with the house? Did they throw them away? Did they put them somewhere and wait for them to dry, and then eat them while thinking about us? It’s much more likely they simply swept them up with an ordinary broom and threw them away.
    I remember the big cold pantry that led to the attic. Shelves. And hundreds of jars with labels on them. I remember my aunt’s handwriting - the sharp, slanted, almost masculine numbers she wrote on the labels, to mark the year, and then glued onto the jars. Such things don’t exist today, or maybe I don’t know they exist, those small jar labels with zigzag edges, similar to stamps. On the walls, pots and pans of various sizes used to hang from cords.
    And then, there’s my first typewriter, which had its own cleaning kit under the lid. Cleaning the typewriter was a process filled with various pleasures. I would remove the black build-up from the small holes of every letter, and then clean the needle. Slowly, letter by letter. First the capital letters, then the small letters, and finally the numbers and punctuation. Then, it was time for the brush. It would remove everything the needle left behind. And then, the final moment of pleasure: putting in a sheet of paper and trying it out. The typed letters were clear, clean, and legible.
    If you wanted to destroy me today, all you would have to do is place one of these items in front of me: a small box of glue, a typewriter cleaning kit, a drying walnut, jar labels…. If you really wanted to finish me off, this would be enough.

I was still angry with her when I went in for my session the following week. On the drive there, I practiced what I was going to say to her: the words I was going to use, and the tone. I tried to anticipate her reaction.
    I brought up those three things.
    The smile on my face when I talk about difficult matters.
    The way I open up to others. And her question as to whether I opened up to her in my own natural pace.
    And finally, the part about expecting a happy ending. I told her no one in his right mind expects to end up in an oncologist’s office or some ditch somewhere. We all somehow hope we’ll find peace and as much contentment as could be expected in our old age. But, we all also know that a fairy tale ending is just an illusion and nothing more.
    “It’s not fair,” I said, “for you to label me as someone who naïvely expects a happy ending based only on the ending of a fairy tale I told you.”
    However, she turned most of her attention to the other part. The part about opening up.
    “Why did that comment upset you so much? I just asked you a question, a simple question: ‘Did you open up to me at your usual pace?’”
    Why can’t she understand? This is not a natural situation and the natural pace cannot be applied here!
    “Don’t you understand,” I asked, “how much this question can shake a person’s will? You may very likely discourage a person from ever coming back to therapy after a question like that! Therapy is, presumably, just that - a process through which a person is supposed to open up. You have witnessed the amount of humiliation I had to go through in order to completely expose my thoughts and feelings. And then, after all that, you tell me I opened up too much. And, what’s worse, that I might be doing the same thing in my everyday life!”
    “I wasn’t judging you. I asked you so many different questions, why is this one such a problem?”
    “Because it’s vital. You can’t all of a sudden say I turned out to be naïve because I trusted you. Not after this long process of establishing trust!”
    I also wanted to remind her of the soft voice she used to relax my body, the way she made me draw stupid things from my childhood and then cry over them, as she assured me there was no