Anja
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I wish I had a daughter. Before starting to write I wonder: ‘Does this need to be an extraordinary piece of writing?’ I do not know. ‘What would I call my daughter?’ ‘Anja’, crosses my mind as I cross the street — red for pedestrians, car at the traffic light start horning. ‘Who is to claim the right to call my daughter Anja? Who will be upset? Who will decide with me? Anja shall not be crossing of a boundary but it will’, as I remember my therapist.
Her name is Anja and she is probably one human of a kind to me. She will not be happy about my choice of the female name. It’s me who will take away her identity and conserve it close to my heart without her consent, rightfully so without the requirement of her consent.
Things changed but her support didn’t — she was there for me, arranged her schedule to fit my scarred soul in between the rows of her outlook calender where I would come and go, late and in time, tears and joy in my eyes, in rain, snow or under the blue sky.
I sit there but don’t dare to look up. Every session I am confident I know the pattern of the Persian carpet in the therapy room by heart and my heart still bleeds stepping on it with my street shoes for the carpet you shall respect. Respect? I do give so much weight to things that don’t deserve that much of importance and ignore the importance of truely relevant matters on the other side.
She has her feet crossed, her hands too. She sits in her black leather chair, with her cozy scarf over her shoulders and a look of full of expectation and curosity. In the past weeks yet, she couldn’t help but feel asleep and I could, from an angle of my sight, see her eye lids close slowly and open abruptly as I went on weeping over my loss.
I have been asking for sympathy, exclusive sympathy for my situation in spite of my fair share of trouble. Not that deep inside, I can feel the pulse of an angry wounded pigeon that feels cold begging for solace and a hand of salvation. I want to be called innocent, a saint, a savior of those who decided to part ways. ‘But that patient leaving the therapy room is everything but a saint’, a voice in my head whispers. ‘You are a shame, you leave out parts of the story for the sake of receiving the solace you don’t deserve. True guilt, false guilt — this is not your matter. You want power.’
I close the door behind myself. I enter the world, again — alone. Here, there are no companions. The only 50 minutes of the day, what an honour, what a luck I enjoy and at the same time 50 minutes of harsh truth, pain and confrontation. I don’t like the therapy but I need it and I know it’s a blessing to be able to come and have the chance to have the most honest conversation among all my relationships.
I feel the slope upwards after the therapy, I need to get my train back to work. Back to work.