Association Libre

I perform while writing. That’s what I am told.

I wait for how your eyes and his are going to meet my sentences on this
white background, how would you interpret my state of heart and what emotion will you project.

I erase and write again. My thoughts fail to meet my speed of writing. Am I
dyslexic?

I wish my brain processes panic attacks the way it rationalizes riddles.

I asked her in my first session; how do people grieve? What are the sets of
emotions that I should feel and in what order? And do you grieve the living as well as the dead? Could you give me a timeline for the process to be closured?

She remained quiet, although she is not a psychoanalyst. She asked that my
exercise for the first week is to witness my emotions.

Easy. After my session, I went to the market and bought the goods that made our only common bond. I didn’t taste any. I took a photo and put them on the shelf in an attempt of completing my mourning checklist.

Do we ever not perform? Isn’t it embedded in our creation, our
reason to be?

When God pushed him from the angels’ platform he ordered his son to
perform.

I even perform when I dream.

Sometimes when I doubt that he is guessing what I am thinking, I
perform in my thinking.

We met randomly in a remote village. After an hour or two of soul
connection, he held my face and offered his view of my thirty-six being.

Tu es cartésienne. Ne prétends plus. Ni dans tes écritures, ni dans tes émotions. Ça ne va jamais faire aucun sens. Ça ne doit pas faire un sens. Relâches.

I took his hand and placed it on my neck. My blood flow pulsed his fingers
at above 100 beats.

I cannot seem to calm it except in my sleep or when I am washing the dishes. Instead of consulting a cardiologist, I downloaded a mystic application on my phone that guides me through messages from the universe. Probably from various parallel universes; I keep on asking and the answers keep on flowing, even at dawn, on holidays and Sundays. I am failing to stop the heart from racing. I intentionally try; yet it teases me by running faster, faster than the beeps of the oximeter. I indulge in stress relief activities, like going on a retreat. They tend to have a counter effect, like Chet Baker Diane’s album. My heart sinks behind the closed doors into the melody and creates counter turbulence, maybe in an attempt to solve it from the inside. Yet, it fails. Let me try the crow pause; she says it helps with the blood pressure and releases stress. My wrists get cramped, and I spend the afternoon distracted on google, wondering if I can still use these hands. Calm is medicine but I get to hear me louder. Baker is a better medicine.

They call me from the reception. He is waiting at the restaurant. I did not
give him my number. Anticipation is sexy and sexy is caffeine for my veins.
Wine flows through the night, red as my cheeks next to the fire. It is
self-validation that my non psychoanalyst told me to work on in session two. I affirm my strong independent being as a source of all safety needed. Still I force an unsettled smile when he pours his heart to his friends about what an exceptional woman I am, how smart, how accomplished, how I escape all stereotypes. He doesn’t stop.

Elle est trop sympathique.
Regardez-la. Sublime.

Sensing my distress, his friend urges him to stop.

Elle n’est pas ta trouvaille ni ta trophée enfin !

My palpitations take a strange turn. I try to carve a space in my brain to
keep that episode intact so I can retell it in my next session; I register the
feeling of discomfort and the number of heartbeats per fifteen seconds and the eyes of his friend paused on my lower neck, all of this kept faithfully in one of my memory pockets.

It is a little bit past midnight, my eyes are still roaming the ceiling,
turning from one side of the bed to the other, the colder side. I replay the
question that I have been revisiting all week; what did you lose when he died. Possibilities. Possibility of what I wanted him to be, of what I wanted us to have.

Our brains function in a sly devious way. Aren’t they ours to tame?
Shouldn’t they be our allies to strategize and win? I add this existential
reflection to another brain pocket proudly to share later. On the flying
bridge, I stop pressing on the gas pedal. I want the ground to swallow me or a bird to pick my car, fly and place it on the other side of the road, where the earth is flat under my feet. I hit a record of my heart race, I am glad I
didn’t have the oximeter on me. I am all nauseous. I lost six kilos since four
months now. If that’s not grieving, then what is, doctor?

In the morning we go on a “small hike”. He starts asking about my
relationship with him, about my mourning, then right after he asks about my exes. I don’t see quite the link. I answer in abrupt sentences, not
purposefully, I haven’t walked uphill in the forest since my class of sports in
1999. I was trying to grasp air in between my words. A cool breeze of November sends chills up my spine. When I return to my room, sweaty and cold, I open my laptop and search for pneumonia then meningitis symptoms. I take a hot shower and hide my tears in the steamy bathroom.

A new face started following me on Instagram. I open my account and relook at my 504 posts. I try to wear his skin and guess how he is going to look at each photo. I scroll down slowly, stare at the absurd captions I wrote, at the nature scenes I didn’t quite capture, at the different angles of my cleavage and at the various hair colors I had. My heart is in my mouth. I lose an hour scrutinizing the screen; that is definitely performing; I am sure of it.  But what about them performing? Is it necessary on a first
conversation to list all the films d’auteurs they have watched? Bergman.
Godard. Kiarostami. Yes I know them. Yet Eat Pray Love is a movie I enjoyed
watching many times. I do not need to be impressed. I am not. I am not
impressed by how many books they have read nor intrigued by their mysterious solo living. I just want to have a genuine laugh and feel the warmth on my skin.

It is the third session. I feel more confident. I am clear on what I want. I
want him to serve as a bridge. A transition. We do not share much in common and he is drawn into his own macho drama. But he nourishes my ego, he is my trophy to break hearts. He has a good looking familiar face. He helped me as well so far ace one great unapologetic orgasm.  Isn’t this progress towards raising my worth score doctor? All that I could get out of her was; you see him as a bridge? Interesting.  All my hormones of stress awoken to the alarm. I didn’t have much more to say about him. I think he knew all the way what he represented to me. He kept silent when I left in the morning, and for several days to follow.

In the corridor I laid on the ground and held hands with the electrician
when the blast exploded. They fixed the door and painted the ceiling. I wanted to buy a cactus to add a green spirit to the space. It costs double my retreat night. I bought a shoe cabinet instead. You never came on the day of the blast. That was the day of separation. Not before. After we evacuated the building, the electrician came back and started gathering the windows’ glass scattered on my bed. I wanted to send you a photo but you didn’t ask for one. Our brain can be kind as well. I do not recall the details of my anxiety. I think I did not panic. I just held his hand silently, mistaking it for yours.

She describes anxiety as the mother company that hires OCD, panic attacks,
phobias and other behaviours to embody it to take form in physical space. To heal it, one should start with controlling the behaviour, the symptoms, not the emotion, not the thought, not the root cause. If one succeeds in controlling the heart beats and avoid the nausea, sweat and numbness, one loses the validating emotion that their body is in danger. The cycle is broken. One then could discover the root cause.

As a methodological thinker, the concept is easy for me. It makes sense. One
should know how to follow instructions.

I finished my healing session and took the bridge towards the city. The
amount of oxygen shrank in my car. I am in control. I am creating this
illusion. The brain seems unavailable at the moment. Sweat covered my
eyeglasses. Unable to keep pressing on the gas pedal forward while seeing cars’ spotlights as blurry dots, I took the first available exit. I spoke with the
first man I encountered under the bridge during corona lock down with 2000 cases and 20 deaths registered that day. He blew his cigarette in my face, smiled toothlessly and offered to accompany me to join each other in our loneliness, he described. My brain cells woke up. I took the flying ramp back home.

I am impatient. My fast pace only accelerates the blood machine in my body. But I am in a hurry of completing my healing checklist and new documents keep on getting attached to the original mail, out of the magician hat, my non-psychoanalyst chair. In session four, we learned that the brain needs time to break patterns. Memories buried in our subconscious during childhood, times of war and mourning, were reinforced by experiences lived throughout our upbringing and adulthood. The mind is faithful to them and doesn’t abandon its creations easily. I wonder if all the 70s and 80s Lebanese generations witnessed the same brain metamorphosis. The flight, fight, freeze modes activated for decades, how did we survive keeping our amygdala on constant alert? If we take a scan of the brain today, the signals look distortedly bright on the MRI. Not very bad after all, it could serve as an artistic contemporary installation.

I decide to let him drive me back home from the mountains. He doesn’t look
like any of them. Maybe it is the extra years he gathered, a possible
advantage. I enjoy the novelty of the conversation. Nothing in common. I enjoy the compliments I am showered with a foreign language.  I turn off my facebook notifications for another week. The other two could always wait, including the boy with the handsome familiar face. I embrace my temporary independence, confidently this time, even with the surplus of tachycardia. I decide to stop cooking my signature dishes for a while. I turn his steering wheel to the other side of the city. It is a start. He smiles.

I am aware of my performance. I embrace the beast and tame the ego.

Can I publish now?

Disclaimer:

I performed while writing this piece, all of it. I would need you to read it
to validate this performance.

Category: Fiction-maybe- Written by Sara Sannouh