You find yourself moving forward in Google Street View on an avenue that cuts east to west across downtown Chicago. Your presence is silent and swift. The application requires you to move through traffic incrementally, an apparition in this faux reality of your choosing.
You’re here because you just read an article in Rolling Stone about exposure therapy, in which military veterans used virtual reality to safely experience and process PTSD triggers from combat zones. Under the supervision of a therapist, they talk through the feelings that come up—in order to create new neural pathways and ease future distress caused by their traumatic memories.
But you are not a soldier and this is not Afghanistan. You are a thirty-five-year-old woman sitting in front of a computer monitor. Because you can see your city’s skyline through a few leafless trees outside your window, you feel safe enough to run your eyes along a two-dimensional map of the city you used to live in. On a whim, you enter Street View, and your pulse quickens. Your body doesn’t seem to know that over a decade has passed.
Instinct tells you the apartment you’re looking for is between Damen and Western, so you try that stretch of Hubbard Street first, losing yourself in the repetitive scenery as you go. Your eyes scan a three-flat red-brick apartment building with a glass block window on the ground floor. Next to it sits a single-story warehouse with a garage door. This architectural arrangement, which you pass at least three times in ten blocks, makes you feel as if an invisible hand has reached out and grabbed you by the guts. What do you hope to gain by revisiting this place? You know that no answers will be found via Google Maps. But you don’t have anywhere else to look.
***
Your favorite outfit is a pair of slate-blue wide-leg pants with subtle corduroy blocking at the knee, and a pink shirt that wraps around the front and ties at the waist. It looks good with your tan skin and blonde hair. You wear it with cork-wedge sandals that have thin, lavender straps made of suede. You drink Campari and orange juice, shaken, out of a chilled martini glass. You smoke cigarettes and stay out until you can’t remember that you are the one who finished your pack.
It’s late, but you are young. Twenty-three, to be exact. You head out from a bar with a guy you know to smoke weed. He says his apartment is nearby, and you’re not far from yours. Smoking will help you sleep soundly. You will forget that other guy who never texted you back, and your night will end at home alone, with you passed out in your clothes. Tomorrow you’ll wake to find your roommate’s runty pit bull waiting outside your door, wagging her tail so hard it moves her entire back half. She loves you unconditionally, and it shows.
The guy driving your car has a tattoo of a rose and a skull on his neck. He’s not exactly your type, but it’s not him you’re interested in, so you don’t think too much about it. You pass the edges of the neighborhood you know and enter an empty part of Chicago that you don’t. The open street parking everywhere makes it feel soulless. “Tarot Readings,” announces a sign on your left. The stoplights, red and green, bleed squiggles into the black sky every time your stick-shift car lunges forward through an intersection.
The tattoo guy parks your teal Honda at the curb, and you step out onto the street to find yourself in front of a brick building that looks like a garage. You follow him inside to a partially converted loft with concrete floors and exposed pipes. There is a single room in the front with a bed—and a second room in the back that looks like an unfinished basement, where two large Dobermans seem to have shit on the floor in several piles. You wonder exactly how long he’s been gone.
This is so embarrassing, he says. It’s never happened before.
Somehow you don’t believe him. Now you are essentially just in his bedroom. He produces a bowl and some pot out of his dresser. You take a couple of hits. He works at a club across the street from the restaurant where you tend bar. When he comes in before his shift to buy a drink, he puts his money down, looks directly in your eyes and says, You can keep the change. It is usually a very small amount that often includes actual change. While irksome, it doesn’t register as any more annoying than how most men behave toward you. You ask him what he does outside of work.
I’m an artist, he says.
What kind?
Tattoo, he says. You lift up the side of your shirt three inches to show him a small tracing of ink on your ribs. It’s a combination of your and your best friend’s initials, which, together, look like an infinity sign. He makes a sort of disgusted face at you—it’s obvious he dislikes it. You don’t really care, since the feeling is mutual. His tattoos look as if they were plucked from a prepubescent boy’s notebook—probably his. His knuckles have letters on them, but you’re too afraid to find out what they say. You think it might be H-A-T-E.
You suddenly realize that you are kind of fucked up and have no exit strategy. The tattoo guy decides he wants to make out with you, so you let him for a couple of minutes. You really don’t think you should drive, but you’re not into taking this make-out session any further, so you decide to take a nap. You have bargained with your body enough for one night. Sleeping has always worked in the past to get dudes to leave you alone. Plus, you’ll be able to drive in an hour or so.
I’m just going to chill for a sec, before I go home, you tell him.
You lay your head down, and before you know it, you are sleeping soundly. Not only are you asleep, but you are having a sex dream. In the dream, you’re with the guy you wanted to text you back earlier that night. He is supposed to just be your hookup, but you recently realized you like him. In the dream, you are in his bed and can hear wind rustling the leaves outside of his window. You feel good, like you are lying on a beach in the Caribbean, and a warm tide is washing over the lower half of your body.
At some point, it occurs to you that you are not on a beach, you are on top of a strange bed in a strange apartment with concrete floors, your pants are unzipped, and tattooed hands are in them. Your body and mind seem to be residing on two separate planets, and the signals between them are taking light years. Before you can reconcile the pleasurable feelings you’re having with the person you don’t want to be having them with, he is pulling off your pants and replacing the flutter you felt from his hands with his tongue. Your body gives in and is rewarded with one giant wave that crashes over you, leaving you completely limp.
The tattooed hands use this opportunity to grab you by the hips and pull you toward the end of the bed. You look down just in time to see him undoing his pants and pushing himself inside of you. Your mind is now screaming. Within a few seconds, the rest of you catches up. Stop, stop, stop, you say. His eyes are vacant. You realize you are pleading with someone who doesn’t even know you’re there. Your body is merely serving a function.
Finally, something appears to click inside his brain.
He rolls off and lies next to you.
You wait for him to fall asleep before crawling out from under his arm. You tiptoe to the door and close it silently behind you. You re-adjust the driver’s seat of your car and sit there, stunned. Your instinct is to light a cigarette, but you realize that your hands are shaking. You put your keys in the ignition instead and start driving—past street names you know but somehow don’t recognize. You feel like you are taking the darkest walk of shame in your life, except no one knows about it but you, nor will they for a very long time.
When you get home, you try to enter your apartment as quietly as possible. You hear your roommate’s pit bull stir at the clunking sound your wedge heels make against the wooden floors and wish she hadn’t noticed your late entrance.
***
A month or so later, you are in bed with the guy who never texted you back that night, and you’re so drunk you can’t get off. You’ve been sleeping together for a while but only recently learned of his long-term relationship. He has a girlfriend, you think. He doesn’t love me, you think.
Strangle me, you say. He presses his fingers into the tender skin above your clavicle and squeezes, but it is not enough. Spit in my mouth, you ask, and then watch his saliva as it dangles down toward you. It’s as if he’s been cradling a tiny egg in his mouth, which he’s now cracking open to share. It’s the only special thing the two of you have together.
You tell yourself that this is just the kind of shit you are into. You have no idea that your sudden urge to master your own degradation has to do with what happened in that brick building on the deserted street. The one you entered as one person and came out another. You can’t begin to bear that loss yet, so you make up a new person to swallow both of your existing selves.
Eventually, he stops calling you all together, and you settle on a new boyfriend who is ten years older than you and also a bartender. Your nickname for him is “Woobie,” like a security blanket. When you decide you can no longer stand living in Chicago, he moves to New York to be with you. But once you’re co-habituating in a shared apartment, you realize you never want to have sex with him again. This, you suppose, is partly because you’re just not that attracted to him. But you also have begun questioning your sexuality.
You’ve noticed that you only like porn with women in it. If a penis shows up, it completely turns you off. So you binge watch the The L Word, secretly hoping you’ll discover that you’re lesbian. But being gay never materializes—it’s just a really good show.
When your doctor asks you what you use for birth control, you say, avoiding sex.
Well, you can’t do that forever, she says. Somewhere inside, you know this is true but aren’t ready to accept it. So you decide to wait out your current relationship by refusing to have sex with your boyfriend until he finally hates you enough to not be mad when you break up with him.
Problem solved, you think—for now.
***
At twenty-seven, you fall in love with a man at your office. He sits at the desk next to you and tips his bag of snacking granola back like it’s a cup, tapping the bottom when it’s close to empty to make sure he gets every last cluster. You openly tease him about this, but that doesn’t stop him from doing it.
Once on your lunch break together, you’re walking out of a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn when someone walks in with a dog that has the same dishwater blond hair as he does.
Oh my god, that dog looks just like you, you say.
The dog proceeds to sniff his crotch, and his face turns red.
Aw, he likes you!
You can hear it in your own voice, but years later he will tell you that this is the moment he knew you liked him.
You begin spending weekends in his garden apartment drinking bottles of pinot noir in the kitchen and then retreating to his bedroom to take photos of yourselves kissing. You love being with him but find sex to be a little awkward. You can no longer flip the switch in your head that you would normally flip to tell your body it’s time to play the part of someone who’s having sex. You feel more vulnerable with this person—this friend you are now falling in love with. You’re afraid of what he would think if he saw you for who you really are.
So you end up drinking heavily. After six months or so, you notice you’ve begun to put on weight. One night, you are having wine and lying on your back in his bed, watching him kiss your stomach. You feel more than just your normal bodily insecurity. It is a creeping disgust. You feel like you’re wearing your body as a suit and suddenly you want to unzip it and leave it by the bedside. You feel smothered by something you can only identify as yourself. You decide to keep drinking until you black out and can’t remember what happened next.
Years later, he tells you that this is the first time you ever told him you were raped.
***
When you are thirty-three, you visit Chicago with the same man who is now your husband. He wants to know your old city—and doesn’t quite understand why you hate it so much. You’ve told him fragments of what happened to you there, which you later minimized or re-canted. Still, you shudder when you walk hand in hand past the restaurant where you used to tend bar. Later, by sheer chance, you drive down a deserted street, and your heartbeat quickens. It is the same feeling you get when you see certain types of sleeve tattoos.
That night, you drink yourself into a stupor—and can barely make the taxi ride to the airport the next day without vomiting into the side pocket of the door. When you get home, you decide to tell your therapist, whom you’ve recently begun seeing for what you thought was unrelated anxiety. The rape has always been there in your mind, but like a corrupt file on a hard drive, your brain was unable to open it without professional help.
When you do finally access the memory in its entirety, it suddenly overwhelms your whole system. It is as if it just happened a few weeks before. You cry every day, like somebody just died. You can’t focus on tasks as basic as writing an e-mail. You don’t even taste the roast chicken and vegetables your husband made you for dinner. This goes on for months. One night, you find yourself lying on your side, facing the back of your leather couch, the rain beating down on your window air conditioner. You realize you can’t imagine ever not feeling this way again.
Your therapist suggests that revisiting the memory might help you move on—if you’re able to experience it differently. She says it’s a commonly used technique, and that you can even imagine a friend being there with you for support. You recoil from this idea because you are too ashamed. You fear that you brought it on yourself, enjoyed it even. You don’t want anyone else, however imaginary, to see you like that.
You think about it some more, and the only “friend” that comes to mind is your old room-mate’s little pit bull Olympia. She is small and brindle, with a white belly and snout. When you lifted the comforter on your bed, she would burrow underneath it to cuddle with you as if on command. You were not sold on her at first, because of your misconceptions about her breed. But she ended up proving you wrong.
You remember watching a show on television once where a large dog played nurse to a bunch of orphan kittens at a shelter. The dog wore a special vest and acted as a calming presence. When one fluffy orange kitten had bath time in a giant red bucket, the dog accompanied her into the room and lay on the ground nearby, remaining visible throughout the ordeal. During the bath, the kitten looked frozen in fear but kept her eyes on the dog. Afterward, she recovered immediately and began crawling happily on the dog again.
You hope your mental replay will go at least as well as dog-nurse-kitty-bath. But when you finally get up the nerve to try it with your therapist, you feel like you’re living the memory all over again. It’s not an out-of-body experience. You are not looking down on yourself from the ceiling. You are face-up on a bed.
Is Olympia with you? your therapist asks.
You see her wagging her tail, pacing back and forth on the floor next to you.
Yes, you answer. Olympia is now making a low gurgling noise, which normally precedes a high-pitched whine. It’s her response to unexpected commotion, like your roommate play-wrestling with her boyfriend. She appears nervous but doesn’t intervene, instead placing her paws in dog stretch pose, as if she might pounce but never does. You don’t take your eyes off her, but in the periphery, can see the dresser that the pot came out of and a TV sitting on top of it. The room has taken on a sepia tint. You begin to feel nauseous.
I can’t do this anymore. You open your eyes.
***
In bed with your husband, you’re trying to enjoy yourself, or at least put on a convincing show so he can enjoy himself. But your mind is wandering, and you can’t focus. Because you’re not present, you can’t experience pleasure. And because you’re not experiencing pleasure, you suddenly have the feeling that your body is being used. It’s like an empty shell you tried to abandon on the beach, but couldn’t, because you were unable to find a new one to occupy.
Your silence gives you away before the tears begin to fall.
This is the cycle. You cry during sex. Your husband stops. You try to recover from the episode and start again, but he is already getting dressed.
It happens so often that you decide go to a couples sex therapist. The questionnaire at the intake appointment sends you into a panic. Do you avoid, fear, or lack interest in sex? Do you approach sex as an obligation? Do you feel emotionally distant or not present during sex? When you check nearly a dozen symptoms, you realize that you have been living in complete denial. You are a loser, a failure, an idiot. You wonder why your husband hasn’t left you already.
The therapist gives you homework—an exercise developed by Masters and Johnson, the duo made famous for their study of the sexual response. Every week, you and your husband lie in bed and touch each other sensually, which is not the same as sexually. You’ve never touched him, or anyone, like that—without an end goal in mind. So you feel like a weirdo at first, lightly rubbing your hand along his chest and down the side of his waist. He touches your back and thighs. Neither of you are supposed to talk, so you play the same instrumental Nels Cline album, Lovers, every time.
At first you leave your underwear on, but find you get nervous anyway. Sometimes you get so anxious you cry and then have to stop, which surprises you. Let’s learn about this, your sex therapist says almost every week. What you learn is that your brain is wired with a fight-or-flight response to any activity that could even be construed as sexual. Once it’s triggered, you feel bad about yourself but try to hide it until you erupt in tears, after which point you feel even worse, because you think you have failed yet again.
Your sex therapist tells you this is the point of the exercise. To let the scared part of you come out and see that it’s safe. It’s okay, your husband learns to say—to reassure you so that you don’t feel bad. You eventually realize that this is the self you have been holding underwater all this time, hoping she would drown. It should come as no surprise that the process of coaxing her back out might take awhile.
***
While you’re in sex therapy with your husband, you’re also plugging ahead with your individual therapist, Judy, whom you really like. She has dark, shoulder-length hair with a few wisps of gray and a twinkle in her brown eyes. Judy is in her mid fifties—not old enough to be your mother or young enough to be your contemporary, so you feel free of judgment when you’re together.
You both take off your shoes in session and play with her office teddy bear. She is freewheeling and fun to talk to, not like other therapists you’ve had in the past, who sat in business suits, legs crossed, treating you like a specimen to be cut off at exactly ten minutes before the hour. She messages you videos of elephants in between sessions, because she knows it is your favorite animal.
She’s brought up the idea of redoing your memory again, of figuring out how to experience it in a way that would leave you feeling less ashamed. The mere mention of this makes you cry. You are tired of experiencing this memory over and over. Of that imagery invading your mind. It’s been almost two years since you started talking about it—and twelve years since it happened.
But you trust her, so you close your eyes and you try. The second you are in that sepia-tinted bedroom, with the dresser and the TV and the man on top of you and the pleasurable feelings you never wanted, you feel like screaming and ripping your entire body off. You can’t do that, so you start crying hysterically, which is really only a default response, because ripping your entire body off isn’t physically possible.
She says, Okay, I don’t want to push you. We don’t have to do it now. You hug her office bear, whose tag says his name is “Grizzles,” and blow your nose, finishing her box of Kleenex. When you get home that evening, you just want to take a hot shower. You feel kind of like the kitty from dog-nurse-kitty-bath, but your dog-nurse is a human man, and he is currently watching TV in the living room with his feet up on the coffee-table.
You are standing under your showerhead, allowing the hot water to beat against your shoulders when it happens: a flashback invades not only your mind, but also your body. You see an image of a penis being forced inside of you, which is not particularly new as far as intrusive imagery goes. But this time, the memory is accompanied by a full bodily sensation. You can feel it happening, and your knees buckle. Some time passes before your husband finds you crouched in a ball in the tub, the shower still running.
He gives you a towel, puts you in bed and lies next to you, trying to calm you down. But you are in hysterics. You try to stutter something out about the flashback, but your mind is already working on another message. It seems to be circling a fairly rudimentary truth that you’ve been too afraid to say aloud. Your lips form the words before you know what they are.
That man put his penis inside of me, and now I’m afraid you won’t want me anymore. You don’t wait for his reaction. You jump out of bed, still soaking wet, and run back to the bathroom to put your head over the toilet to vomit. Nothing comes out. Instead you convulse, dry heaving for thirty seconds before collapsing onto the glossy tiles the two of you picked out for the bathroom floor. They are cool against your skin, in a blue the color of the Mediterranean.
***
One day, shortly after your thirty-fifth birthday, you are meditating at a center near your office in Manhattan. It’s helped you quiet your nervous thoughts. You’re about twenty minutes into a relaxation session when two words pop into your head, as if out of nowhere: ghost penis. You assume that it is a message from your subconscious about the significance of the flashback you experienced in the shower. It feels like a riddle that you suddenly need to solve.
The next night you go to see Judy at your individual therapy. You’ve been doing much better, and she brings up the idea of trying to revisit the memory again. She says you would be in complete control. She casually mentions that you could do whatever you want, even if it’s violent. You think this must be a sign. You are finally going to kill what has haunted you for so long. You will vanquish it from inside of you forever.
You lean in and lower your voice. Could we Lorena-Bobbitt him?
She makes a serious face. Yes.
You tell her about your meditation session the night before. How the words just flopped into your head. You both giggle. Freudian slip, you say. You giggle some more.
She says you can bring anyone you want. Together you decide on an imaginary elephant, which you think would fit into the loft apartment. Yeah, an elephant, she says. Their trunks are pretty strong. You hadn’t thought about that but agree that it’s true. Once, when you went to visit an elephant orphanage in Nairobi on vacation, you were standing in front of a two-year-old calf in a stable when she extended her trunk out toward you. You thought it was adorable—until she grabbed your umbrella, pulled it through her gate, and snapped it in a matter of seconds.
You wonder momentarily if it would be ethical to rope an imaginary elephant into a violent revenge fantasy. But you decide you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it. You’re more interested in the fact that elephants don’t seem to feel shame. They walk around in skin that hangs off their bodies like an oversized onesie. They roll in the mud naked without an inkling of insecurity. They live in groups that protect the young and vulnerable.
The next time you’re in a session, you decide to give it a try. Immediately, you’re in the apart-ment again, and your imaginary elephant—who is small for a full-grown female but still pretty big to be inside of a human dwelling—is distracting you from what’s happening. She keeps one eye on you as she continues browsing for plants with her trunk, even though you’re both standing on a concrete floor.
Out of the corner of your eye, you see a version of yourself on the bed with your knees bent and the dresser with the TV on top of it. You’re in the middle of trying to unfreeze from the fear this scene is causing you when you remember that you are not required to stay.
I want to stop, you say, and then almost regret it.
You could have stayed longer this time but are beginning to wonder why this exercise isn’t working for you. You think it might be because, after so many years of denial, you have commit-ted yourself to finding and understanding the truth. To try to revise the memory now, after you finally achieved such painful clarity, seems like it might somehow dishonor the journey it took for you to get here.
***
You decide that if you do ever take an imaginary human with you to that scary apartment, it would be your husband. After six months of laying in bed touching each other in a non-sexual way and talking through all the feelings that come up, you realize he doesn’t judge you. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with you. You’re surprised to learn how attuned he is to your feelings—something you never would have known had your sex life not come crashing down around you.
One time, while doing your half-hour of weekly sensual touching, your mind wanders, and you start thinking about adopting a dog. That week at therapy, he says the exercise was “weird” and that you’d been “petting him like a dog.” You laugh and tell him the truth—you were thinking about petting a dog. Another time, when you admit to the therapist you had a mini-flashback while he was touching you, but didn’t say anything because you didn’t want him to know, he says he saw the goose bumps on your arm.
He picks up on almost everything, and you stop trying to protect him from any of it. You had no idea that allowing someone else to see the parts of yourself that scare you the most—and love you even more for them—was exactly what you needed.
Your sex therapist can tell you’ve made progress and suggests you start touching each other in more overtly sexual places, but still non-sexually. You don’t really understand what this means, so he tries to help you imagine it. What would it be like to just hold his penis in your hand? You would normally laugh at this question, but suddenly you feel as if your mind is floating—like you’re sitting on a leather couch having this therapy session under water.
You realize that you have never touched a penis without feeling pressure to “do something” with it. Normally, your approach would be to get in there, accomplish the mission, and get the hell out. You cannot even imagine what he is describing.
I would feel like a pervert, you say, like I’m playing doctor.
You agree to try it anyway. But as soon as the penis holding is introduced into your weekly routine, you somehow manage to avoid doing your sex therapy homework for three weeks. And it’s not just you. Your husband complains of headaches or being tired when Sunday night rolls around, the weekly time slot you’ve set aside for this. You suspect it would be much easier on both of you to stay in this safe and happy dog-petting zone for the time being.
***
While you’re struggling to move forward in sex therapy, you also feel stuck in your own therapy. You’ve been trying for over two years to redo that painful memory without any success. You tell Judy about the article you read in Rolling Stone about exposure therapy. How you went to Google Street View to find the red brick apartment. How it made your blood run cold.
She says the point of revisiting the memory is not to trigger yourself over and over, but to bring the resources you have now back to help your younger self, who had to keep this secret all alone. In order to do this, you first have to be able to uncouple current you from past you—the one who experienced the trauma. You understand this in theory, but in practice find it hard to accomplish. She suggests instead of visiting that apartment again, you invite your younger self to visit you here, in her Manhattan office.
You have no idea how to do it, but you close your eyes and try.
Imagine she’s sitting in that chair, Judy says.
You feel silly doing this at first, but slowly you begin to see her.
What does she look like? Judy asks.
She has long blonde hair and is wearing her favorite outfit: a pair of slate-blue pants and a pink shirt that wraps and ties in the front.
What is she doing?
She is smoking a cigarette and laughing. She is clearly in a good mood. This makes you cry, and at first you don’t know why. Later, you realize it’s because you feel bad for her, about the loss she will soon endure, and the years of confusion and sadness that will follow.
It finally occurs to you that the work you are doing to heal yourself psychologically has less to do with purging some phantom from your past and more to do with caring for the version of yourself who never got the love and attention she deserved.
***
A few weeks later, you’re talking about penises again in sex therapy, but this time it doesn’t make you squeamish. You haven’t had a flashback in a while and feel up to taking the next step, whatever it may be.
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a penis? your sex therapist asks. That thing I have to touch, you say, without stopping to think that you might be offending your husband. Honestly, it has nothing to do with him; you’ve never been a big fan. Or is that just what you’ve been telling yourself? You’re not sure anymore.
In the past, you wouldn’t have been nervous about touching your husband, but now that you’ve started your sex life over, it seems like an important step that you don’t want to screw up. The following Sunday, when you’re rubbing your hand along his waistline, you almost do it but lose your nerve. He teases you afterward. He says he could tell you were considering it—but decided against. You feel like a teenager, and your face flushes in embarrassment.
The next week, when he puts on a jazz record and climbs into bed, you already have a plan. After about ten minutes, you make a move and hold his penis in your hand for about thirty seconds, even though this is excruciatingly awkward. You think to yourself that it feels friendly. He looks incredibly uncomfortable, a small grimace forming across his face, and you don’t blame him. You assume it’s due to the awkwardness, but he later explains that he was trying to avoid getting an erection. He didn’t want to scare you away. You decide those must have been the friendly vibes you picked up on.
***
The next week, while lying on a couch in Judy’s office, you decide to pay a visit to your twenty-three-year-old self back in Chicago. She was fired from the restaurant the tattooed man used to come into and now works at a different bar in another neighborhood. She never under-stood precisely why she was let go, but it occurs to you that she was probably going through a pretty difficult time—with no one to talk to.
You tell Judy she has to sit in the imaginary car. You think your younger self might be spooked by your glasses and your sensible shoes as it is. So you mentally enter the bar alone to find her at a table in the back, smoking a cigarette on her break. She’s changed her hair, you notice. It’s darker, and she now has bangs.
If you could give her something, what would it be? Judy asks from the floor beside you.
You don’t have to think about this at all. You reach into your imaginary bag and pull out a brown stuffed dog, like the one the two of you had when you were little. You bet she would like to sleep with it.
What is her reaction?
She likes it, you say. You picture her smiling with her arms folded across the dog, hugging it. She’s making the same face she did in a photo from her twenty-first birthday, except then she was wearing a party hat.
Do you think it will make her feel better?
You don’t have to think about this either.
I know it will.
You open your eyes.
Sarah Kasbeer is the author of the essay collection, A Woman, a Plan, an Outline of a Man. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Dissent, Elle, Guernica, The Rumpus, and the ‘Notables’ section of the Best American Essays.
Photo by Bonito Club on Foter.com / CC BY-NC