She feels moody and dangerous as the sun disappears over the horizon and her arm slices through the humid air, swollen with water, practically dripping. She smells wet dogs. She imagines that she is cleaving the air into two halves, and she is now resting somewhere between these halves, in the not-air. She imagines a world where she could part the air like Moses and walk nimbly between the two sides and everyone would gasp and say, “It’s a miracle” and “breathing is so passé.”
Then she imagines that instead of splitting the air into two she is splitting all the particles of matter—all the air molecules and the atoms and the dust bits and the dead-hair follicles—into tiny, incomprehensible pieces; she’s breaking down what they said could not be broken down but of course everything can be broken down, examined, scrutinized until all that’s left is nothing, or something, but only something when it is framed against nothing.
This is how she feels in therapy – that she is a tiny molecule that is being cleaved into ever-tinier parts in the hopes of uncovering some kind of root, some kind of stem or the vital part of what makes her her – that fundamental something. She doesn’t know what makes her her. She knows that she is made up of atoms, and she thinks that if her body’s atoms could talk they would be saying “fuck this.” The certificate on Dr. Bradford’s wall says that he is a psychologist, a psycho-analyst, an analyst for psychos. Even psychos are made up of atoms, she thinks. Even psychos have those same basic parts, those rudimentary molecules – which ones rebelled? A foot cell got mixed up in the arm cells? An adventurous elbow cell took a vacation down to the left ankle and never headed back north? What combinations lead to perfection in some and disaster in others?
