Precipitation
Sprinting out of the restaurant, she entered a hot rainy night. The evening had been, for better or for worse, a complete disaster. A nefarious tingle coursed through her veins, prickled at the bulbs of her hair. But ultimately, there was nothing to be done about it now.
People were always reminding her of her faults— she was always reminded of how flawed she was! It’s what John had done the entire dinner: picked every so daintily at the scab of her wounded psyche. The salad, a cluster of undressed bitter leaves, arrived as he was musing on her relationship with her twin siblings.
“I just think you ought to consider how hard they’ve had it growing up without both parents.”
She blinked.
“I mean, you had the blessing of experiencing them both and it’s as though you blame them for your mother’s death! I’ll never understand it.”
He sipped his wine thoughtfully. She continued to chew in silence.
The waiter noticed that something was amiss each time he came to clear a plate or refill a glass. She yearned for him to save her, to realize that she was a baboon trapped in an animal testing facility. But he wasn’t there with her, not really.
She met John the year prior in a laundromat. A revolting New York meet-cute, but a meet-cute nonetheless. He approached her for a dryer sheet, asking to ‘borrow it and bring it right back’. He was averagely handsome and strikingly tall, a trait that automatically made him more appealing.
At the time, she had just started seeing a new analyst, a woman on the Upper East Side who held sessions in her Gilded Age sitting room. She feared to admit she was seeing her simply to experience the grandeur of that room once a week, to transpose herself to a time where domesticity and subservience were the only things expected of her. The analyst thought she ought to “see what this fellow was all about.”
John asked if she’d like to go for a bike ride along the river. Truthfully, she hated biking, hated any motion that involved her feet leaving the ground. But she agreed, because her analyst knew what the Id wanted.
Right off the bat, she felt simultaneous great unease and comfort around John. He was gratuitously charismatic, considerate, and manipulative. He exhibited cataclysmic qualities in a future partner that greatly seduced her to a point where, she told her analyst, she was beginning to slip. The analyst listened intently to her recall when John told her that a shadowed past was always bound to unearth itself, that her job at a prestigious firm couldn’t possibly withstand a past like that.
“What I’m seeing here is a manifestation of the devil on your shoulder, so to speak. An energy that feeds on deep set insecurities and fears. If we’re to look through a Lacanian lens at toxic masculinity, he represents the scope of the antithetical father,” said the analyst.
“I don’t follow,” she replied.
At the table, the waiter brought out the main course, seared duck breast with clementine confit. It looked revolting and she wished to projectile vomit all over the crisp white tablecloth.
“All I’m saying is, I love you and want the best for you. And that translates in part to treating those around you like they matter.”
Suddenly, everything began to buzz. Her head began to spin; the mouths on the signed celebrity headshots on the wall began to open and close maniacally. She looked down at her hands, could see the bones through the skin. They belonged to some animorph. What’s happening to me? TO ME?
John’s fork scraped against the plate. He looked lovingly at her and smiled.
“Enjoy your trip.”