by Jordan Holman
Lauren’s office had an unobstructed view, so I got to stare at the Pacific Ocean while I suffered through her psychoanalysis.
The drive was even more painful. I fidgeted uncomfortably in my seat as I squeezed through a maze of Teslas in my beat up Toyota Corolla. I was convinced that the bent knees and constant neck craning were going to give me early onset arthritis. I was 25.
But this was the only option, the only person who would take my insurance and who had availability at the exact times I needed it. And Los Angeles was the only city in the world that could make mental health trendy, but it also meant that almost all the professionals were taken. So I drove from Echo Park to Santa Monica every Friday afternoon—and I knew all my friends’ therapists by name.
“My boss yelled at me for some dumb mistake and I started totally freaking out so naturally I asked myself ‘WWSS’ (What would Sarah say?), ” my friend Alexa told me casually at brunch last weekend.
Sarah was her therapist.
“Naturally,” I replied.
This was normal.
Lauren was beautiful. Poised. She had that quintessential ‘I grew up in LA’ look (lip injections and at least a little bit of botox) but you could tell she was naturally pretty. She parted her blonde hair slightly to the side and it fell in the most effortless looking wave. She hung her numerous accolades on the wall behind her. She had been top of her class at Brown and had already won several psychotherapy awards. She recently told me she was dreading this upcoming summer because it meant she’d be turning 30. She was 29 and had already accomplished this much?! She had her own private practice on Main Street and a fancy couch for me to sit on. I was 25, a scholarship kid from the Inland Empire with an English degree from USC and only a shitty social media job and toxic boyfriend to show for it.
I started going to her because I had been getting this shooting pain in my chest whenever I was around Josh, which I said was odd because we’d been together for five years at that point. It seemed silly. It happened when I’d misplace something trivial and he’d grow agitated. It happened when I’d miss an exit on the freeway and he’d roll his eyes.
“I get lightheaded and my palms all feel sweaty,” I told her.
“It’s the onset of a panic attack,” she replied.
“Oh, god.”
“It’s okay,” she said gently.
The next thing she told me was that I had something called an anxious attachment style.
I scoffed and looked out at the ocean.
“It’s okay.”
There it was again.
And she leaned forward in her chair.
I also had a schizophrenic mother and an absent father, so I guess she had a point.
“No one ever took care of you as a kid,” she said. “So you crave that validation now, even if it doesn’t always serve you.”
“Then I worry that they’re going to leave.”
She looked at me with these big, kind eyes.
“Josh barely even acknowledged me this week,” I told her through shallow breaths at the next session.
“When we’re together, he’s always on his phone. And when he does finally say something, it’s usually to complain that I didn’t buy the right kind of milk or that my hair doesn’t look like it’s been properly brushed.”
I could see the wheels turning in her head.
“Look, I don’t know why I stick around either. I mean, I love him… and, ya know, it hasn’t always been like this.”
I reminisced on our fond memories together as a couple, the early days, when he’d surprise me with a bouquet of flowers or take me out on boating trips along the marina.
Josh was rich. But that isn’t why I loved him. I promise! He was normal. His family ate Sunday dinner together and his dad taught him how to play poker and his mom somehow always smelled like freshly baked cupcakes. My mom had an untreated mental illness and my dad disappeared every time she had an episode. So I loved normal. And I loved Josh.
We spent the next session trying to figure out why I was unwilling to break up with him.
“Have you ever heard of EMDR?” she asked me.
I cocked my head to the side.
“Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.”
“Oh, god.” I said again.
“It sounds scary but I promise it’s not,” she laughed. “Do you trust me?”
I looked up at the certificates on the wall and nodded my head.
“We are going to reprocess a memory from your childhood to help break this cycle with Josh, okay?”
I nodded again. And the next thing I knew I was holding a two-pronged machine and she was zapping my hands every few seconds. My left would vibrate when I remembered something new, and my right would buzz every time I felt a surge of emotion in my body. It looked like sorcery, or maybe some form of witchcraft, but it was doing something.
“Picture little Lindsay,” she said. “Her dad is walking away while her mom is hallucinating. He isn’t there for her, and they aren’t there for you. Everyone is screaming. What’s happening now?”
“He’s grabbing her by the wrists,” I said softly. “And then he slams the door.”
She cleared her throat and I noticed that her voice was shaky as she stated, “And you are all by yourself.”
I squirmed in my seat.
“I know this is hard. But picture yourself now—25 year old, emotionally mature Lindsay—giving that little girl a hug.”
I cried all the way back to Echo Park that night, sobbing as the sun slipped behind the city and as my hands strangled the steering wheel.
“That’s normal,” she said. “EMDR releases all the feelings we’ve bottled up.”
So I spent the next several weeks holding the machine.
The afternoon before one of our EMDR sessions I ran into her at the coffee shop across the street.
In a dainty, high-pitched voice, the barista had called out, “Small half-caff iced oat latte with stevia for L—”
I reached for the cup.
“Lauren,” she finished, and my hand brushed against another’s as we gripped the coffee sleeve in unison.
I looked up to see piercing blue eyes, and my cheeks grew hot and red.
“Oh!” I said, noticeably startled.
“You have good taste,” Lauren winked and walked away.
“That was funny,” she said when we reunited in her office a few minutes later. “I thought my coffee order was quite specific, but I guess not so much.”
I laughed quietly and looked down at the rug.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do when I see you in public,” I confessed.
“It feels weird, I know,” she replied. “I can’t really acknowledge you first, or expose the nature of our relationship, but you can approach me. Does that make sense?”
I nodded.
So next time I did.
A few weeks passed and after our session I was scrounging for dinner supplies at the Whole Foods down the block. I made a wrong turn down the health aisle (I was heading for frozen food) when I spotted her holding a $40 bottle of edible sea moss. She glanced up simultaneously and the corners of her lips formed an inconspicuous smile.
“Fancy seeing you here!” I said, breaking the ice with a friendly sledgehammer.
“Preparing dinner, I see,” she said, looking down at my cart. Hers was filled with kale and chickpea pasta and that ridiculously priced sea moss.
Mine was full of wine and instant ramen and a king size bag of M&M’s.
“Oh, god.”
“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “Really. When I was in therapy, I used to go to the same ice cream shop every week after my session. I always ordered the fudge sundae, with an added brownie on top,” she laughed as she reminisced. “The owner knew my name.”
That was the first time she’d ever admitted to needing a therapist of her own.
“What is coming up for you now?” she asked as my hands rested on the machine.
“I feel angry,” I said. “I have so much love to give, and I feel like Josh just takes advantage of it.”
“You feel angry,” she repeated back.
“And I want to stand up to him.”
“Good. That’s really good progress, Lindsay.”
“It does feel good but it also feels scary,” I said, and I felt my heart leap into my throat. “Sometimes I still get these palpitations.”
“You’re not alone in that.”
I looked at her, almost in disbelief, digging my hand into my chest.
“When I was 20, I went to see a cardiologist because I thought I had a heart condition,” she admitted. “Turns out it was just debilitating anxiety.”
Her diplomas were fastened on the wall and her Freudian books were displayed in alphabetical order and her curls were perfectly wound and she was human. A human who could afford sea moss and who lived on the Westside and who received a master’s degree from an Ivy, and a human who, at least at one point, had debilitating anxiety.
“I’ve lived quite a life too,” she said. “Trust me on that.”
I fidgeted on the cushion.
“I hope it’s okay for me to say this, but sometimes I feel like you’re the older sister I never had,” I told her.
“That is so sweet, Lindsay. I’m really taking that in,” she said, and she placed her hand over her palpitating heart.
But then she promptly changed the subject and asked me something about my long-term goals.
“I think I told you I work in social media,” I said. “But that’s just because it was the first job I was offered out of college and I certainly didn’t spend four years reading medieval literature just to post tacky Instagram stories and proofread captions for the rest of my life.”
She laughed.
“I want to be a writer.”
She raised her eyebrows in curiosity.
“As a kid I dreamed of publishing a novel.”
“Fiction or nonfiction?” she asked.
“I’m still working that part out. I’ve always wondered if my life is interesting enough for a memoir.”
“It most definitely is.”
I laughed, too, and then squirmed again in my seat.
“Have I told you that I’m also working on a book?” she asked.
“No!” I grew increasingly intrigued. “Let me guess, it’s a psychoanalytic deep dive and I’m the frenetic client with a funny pseudonym.”
“It’s narrative nonfiction, actually,” she corrected me. “It’s about myself.”
I studied her quietly. I leaned back against the couch, my eyes lasered onto hers as if extracting information she’d buried deep inside her mind.
“I guess our coffee order and heart palpitations aren’t the only things we have in common,” I responded.
“I told you, I’ve lived quite a life too.”
I studied her even harder that night. I put my social media sleuthing skills to the test (this was part of my job after all) and somehow ended up on Zillow looking at the estimate of her childhood home: a three story place in Brentwood with a $12 million sticker price. I grew up in Joshua Tree, always with the caveat ‘before it was cool.’ Then I found an article she’d written in the Daily Trojan about battling depression as a college student. I forgot she was a USC alum too… definitely not a scholarship kid.
The following week, when I still hadn’t confronted Josh, I talked about my dad again.
“He was so unpredictable,” I said. “The tiniest thing would set him off. If my mom even so much as breathed wrong he’d lose his temper. He said that her episodes ‘triggered’ him—that he hadn’t ‘signed up for this’ when he married her.”
Lauren shook her head in disgust.
“But he always told me I was good—and that I was good because I listened and didn’t talk back and did well in school and gave him reasons to still come around occasionally. He’d tell me he was proud of me often. So I loved him.”
She nodded with compassion.
“But he also hit my mom.”
Her left eye twitched.
“How could I love someone like that?” and I buried my head in my hands.
“You are so wonderful,” she said, and I laughed in surprise.
“You are,” she repeated. “He is the problem, not you. It has never been you,” and it sounded like she was holding back tears of her own.
“It has never been you.” Those words played on repeat as I swerved through rush hour traffic that night.
Delicate raindrops fell onto my windshield as I pulled into the driveway and I came home to find Josh waiting outside my apartment door.
My whole body convulsed as I told her the news. I was choking on my words with such force that my sentences delivered in messy fragments.
“He…he cheated on me, Lauren,” and I folded my body over like a flimsy pancake.
“He cheated on you?”
Her voice was sharp and inflected, revealing the depth of her surprise.
I nodded as black stains streaked down my face.
My uncontrollable sobs ricocheted off the walls and echoed around both of us.
“I am so sorry, Lindsay,” she said, and I grabbed a fresh tissue from her box.
“I just feel so unloveable,” I cried out.
“No, no, no,” she said quickly. “That is so not true.”
“How do you know? How could you possibly know? I wasn’t good enough for Josh. I gave him everything I had and it still wasn’t enough. Everyone always leaves,” I hyperventilated as I gripped the edge of the couch.
“But I’m right here,” she said.
“There’s no telling you won’t leave me too.”
I continued to cry uncontrollably until she offered to sit beside me.
“Can I hold your hand?” she asked, and I managed to let out a measly-sounding ‘yes.’
“You’re the only person who sees me,” I whispered, and she rested her other hand on my shoulder.
“He is such a fucking asshole,” she announced after several minutes of silence. And for a fleeting moment we laughed together.
“I’ve decided that I hate all men,” I declared at our next session.
“Totally fair,” she replied.
“You’re not going to tell me I’m grossly overreacting?”
“I can’t really argue with this one.”
“I’m just glad to see I didn’t scare you off after last week.”
“You could never.”
There was a dramatic pause before I told her I wished Josh could have a taste of his own medicine.
“Ya know…” she said, resting her chin on her fist, contemplating. “… in my professional opinion, I find revenge to be therapeutic.”
I let out a witch-like cackle and told her she couldn’t be serious.
“Eh. What’s the harm in a little tit-for-tat? It’s just a way for you to express your emotions.”
She was right. She was always right.
“I’ve been plotting all week,” she told me at the next session. She pulled out a dusty notebook and the crack of its spine reverberated through the room.
“I mean, you could hook up with this best friend?”
“His best friend is gay.”
“Hmmm. You could badmouth him all over social media?”
“I don’t want to do anything that makes me look stupid,” I said.
“You’re right.”
We tossed around ideas for what felt like five minutes, but when I looked at the clock I saw that it was somehow already 4:52. Time was up.
“I wish there was a way to make these sessions last longer.”
She crossed her legs and looked out at the ocean.
“Every Sunday around 10am I treat myself to a pain au raisin at the Tartine boulangerie on Arizona Avenue,” Lauren told me. And if you just so happen to find yourself there, my name is Ashley, I’m an interior designer, and we met at a USC alumni event a few years ago and have been acquaintances ever since.”
You’re the only person who sees me.
I wasn’t sure I could afford a frilly French pastry and another commute to the Westside,
but I agreed.
“Katie!!” she squealed and draped her arms around my neck. She was hugging me. This was new, so I lingered until I felt her pull away. “So good to see you!”
Her hair was thrown into a slicked back bun. She was wearing a tiny black dress, jet black tights, and… cowboy boots—candy apple red. She made it look chic.
“Hey… Ash!”
I tried to play it cool when they took our order—as if I had just reunited with an old friend, as if she didn’t know every dark and terrible secret about me.
As expected, she got the pain au raisin. I chose the mangled croissant at the bottom of the pile.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lauren said. “She’ll have a croque monsieur.”
I looked at her with suspicion.
“They’re delicious; you’ll love it… I studied abroad in Paris,” she said as she dug her card into the machine.
“I’m afraid I’m not as… comfortable as you are,” and I squirmed in my seat.
“Monetary comfort doesn’t save you from everything,” she said.
I scraped the melted gruyeré across my plate as she spoke.
“We start with the old classic: hair loss supplements in his shampoo. No one likes a 25 year old with a receding hairline. Then ‘accidentally’ wash his whites with your reds. Voila! All his clothes are pink,” and she enthusiastically raised her hands in the air.
Josh still had a bunch of his old stuff at my place; the plan seemed plausible enough.
So every Friday we would reprocess my childhood trauma, and every Sunday we would scheme. “I really enjoy our little chats,” she’d say to me. And I’d repeat the phrase “It has never been you” on the drive home.
“We need something bolder,” she told me. “Something that will really pack a punch. Hear me out: you should befriend the girl he cheated on you with.”
“What?!”
“Show him you don’t care. You’re a bigger person. Be a—”
“Girl’s girl?”
“Exactly. Men hate modern day feminism.”
She stabbed her knife into the center of her pastry and the juice from the raisins oozed onto the plate.
“You’re very creative,” I told her.
“I’m invested.”
“You get me.”
“I get what it’s like to be angry. I actually took a boxing class when I was your age. I told people it was to learn self-defense, but really it was just an outlet for my ‘hysterical female rage.’ You know what they say.”
“I do.”
“It can feel like this vicious cycle at the beginning, right? But we’re working on it… in more ways than one,” she smiled.
“We are… it just feels lonely sometimes. Like I’m the only person in the world who can’t just move on with their emotions.”
“You’re not. I’ll self-disclose for just a second here…” and she looked down at the table. “I had a bit of a rough time in college.”
My mind flashed to the article, but I pretended to be shocked.
“I actually took a semester off at one point.”
“You did?!”
“You can imagine what my conservative, corporate lawyer parents thought about that one.”
“My mom was just excited that I even got into college, let alone USC. I don’t think anything I could have done after that would have truly disappointed her. I’m really sorry,” I said.
She waved her hands in front of her face, as if swatting away a trivial problem.
“But you graduated! Then you literally went to Brown. That is iconic. You are iconic,” and I stared into the pearl necklace that hung elegantly around her neck. Untarnished.
“And you’re, like, the best therapist ever! Or the best friend or acquaintance or fellow alum or whatever I’m supposed to say. I mean, you’re the only person who sees me, remember?” and my eyes glued onto hers.
She looked at me with this big, pirahna-like grin—light bouncing off her polished teeth. She had me in the palm of her hand.
“You know Levi Lewis?” she asked.
“You mean that extremely mediocre actor from the teeny bopper show that all high schoolers seem to be clinically obsessed with?”
“Well, when I was 19 I didn’t find him so mediocre, Lind—Katie. But good to know where you stand,” she chucked softly.
“Oh, god. What! No, I mean not mediocre per se, just…”
“It’s okay,” she interrupted.
“You guys… were together?”
“He went to film school at USC and lived on my floor sophomore year. I was obsessed with him. He knew it, I knew it, everybody knew it. I would have done anything for his attention. So he’d invite me to this party, to that concert, to this function, et cetera. Then he wouldn’t speak to me again for weeks.”
“Disgusting,” I said.
“Very.”
“There was this big end-of-semester thing at his frat and he took me. He forced these special, ‘one-of-a-kind’ cocktails down my throat all night.”
I could a see a droplet of sweat forming along the crease in her forehead, and she tangled her hands into an anxious knot.
“I don’t recall going to sleep that night, but I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine. My clothes were strewn across the floor.”
My left eye twitched.
“Lauren…”
She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
“I didn’t remember anything for a long time, but as you know, EMDR unearths all of that.”
“Lauren, I am so, so sorry.”
“And then you get better,” she smiled, half-convincingly.
She freed her hands from the knot.
“Your parents… they’re lawyers. They could have helped you press char—”
“Are you kidding? Their perfectly chaste little girl would have been caught underage drinking at a frat party. It would have ‘ruined their reputation.’”
She started crying.
“You’re not the one at fault here, you know that,” I told her. “It has never been you.”
It has never been you.
“Sometimes old wounds still bleed through their scabs,” she said.
“Can I sit next to you?” I asked and quickly shuffled to the other side of the table.
“Can I hold your hand?” and she nodded.
“A much, much bigger asshole than Josh,” I said. And for a moment we laughed together.
A blue message jumped across my screen: “Text me when you meet up with her so I know you’re okay!” it read.
Then one after another in quick succession:
“How’s it going? Are you at his apartment yet? Are there any updates?”
“Please locate the nearest police station in the event that things escalate!”
“Can you send me your address so I know you’re safe?!”
“706 N. Alvarado Street. Apartment #15,” and I locked eyes with the girl.
She loved the message in a matter of seconds.
Alexa told me that she texts Sarah outside of work hours all the time. “Whenever I’m in a crisis, she’s my go-to gal!”
This was normal.
“We did it. We confronted him,” I told her on Sunday.
“And how does it feel??”
“I hate to admit it, but it feels really great.”
“See! Look at you, feeling through the wave of those tough emotions. I’m very proud of you.”
“We gave him hell,” I said. “The look on his face, knowing the two of us were a united front against him, was priceless.
“Do you feel like you’re over him?” she asked.
“It’s weird but I kind of do?”
“Revenge might just be the answer,” she said.
“What are you plotting now?” I asked jokingly.
“I’m just thinking about Levi, that’s all. About all the ways I could torture him,” and she clasped her hands and tapped her fingertips together like a powerful, all-knowing oracle. “In good fun.”
“That guy deserves some serious shit,” I said. “I mean, I could help you brainstorm ideas.”
My own problems had started melting away, so I needed to come up with excuses to keep seeing Lauren.
“I would never ask you to do something like that,” she replied. Our sessions and our bakery chats are about you!”
But the following week I told her to slash his tires, and she wrote the idea down in her notebook.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asked me.
You’re the only person who sees me.
She had me in the palm of her hands.
————
I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was on my way to work when I saw the notification: “TV star Levi Lewis found dead in Malibu mansion.”
Twitter was going crazy.
“R.I.P. to my all-time favorite celebrity crush.”
“He will be sorely missed.”
“Loved him in ‘The Summer at the Pier!!”
“I heard he paid someone to cover up on-set sexual assault allegations.”
“Hollywood loves to defend the abuser.”
“Trojans forever! Fight on in heaven, brother.”
“He was such a talent. A real force to be reckoned with.”
The plan was for her to trespass onto the property late at night while he was supposed to be out attending some party in the Hills. She only had the intention of stealing a few prized possessions. She wore a disguise. She covered her tracks. But he had come down with the flu and was unexpectedly not at the party in the Hills. He spotted the intruder and grabbed her by the wrists. And suddenly she was 19 and back at the party at Theta Xi. So she reached for a kitchen knife and stabbed him. She says it was suppsed to be a one time thing. A little warning jab in the upper thigh. But now he was the one lying on the floor and she was the one towering over him. So she kept going.
She had accolades on her wall and a brand new designer bag and an office along the water. She was the keeper of other people’s trauma and she was strong and she was healed and she was the only person who ever saw me. She was Westside royalty. She probably had a million friends. And she called me that morning.
“Lindsay…” her voice cracked like the embers of a dying flame.
About the Author
Jordan Holman is a recent graduate of UCLA’s Department of English – Creative Writing. Her pieces appear in Prose Online and Sad Girl Diaries. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she spent the past year living in Paris and often aims to integrate her travel and coming-of-age experiences into her work.