At 5:11 the cat tromps across
my pillow, the dog wants a piss, me too. After dealing with it all I don’t
sleep, but start wondering about today’s first counselling session. Who starts,
what questions, what do I have to say? Do I really want to be there? Can I see
the process reaching any useful conclusion, especially if I’m asking these
questions?
More questions find their way
out of the gloom in the back of my head. It seems to me that my physical desire
for my good woman died when the possibility of living with her went west. It
went west when the doubts set in about whether I would, should or could live
with her.
Perhaps I lost physical
interest because I just lost physical interest. I recognise a pattern here: the
same symptom has occurred before with others. Perhaps this time it’s taken
longer, not because my good woman is better looking or more sexually attractive
than others, but because we seemed so well suited.
Perhaps my diminished physical
desire is a reflection of a diminished interest in maintaining a relationship.
Is it that I just want to be on my own again, tired of the imposition a
relationship makes on the things I like doing.
Am I that shallow, that
selfish, that ambivalent about the value of being with someone else? Am I just
a flawed individual, incapable of a genuine long-term relationship?
I catch the train to Hawthorn,
read a Jack Irish crime novel on the journey, keep my mind off other things. I
check the real estate while walking from the station to the counsellor’s rooms.
It’s a preliminary session. Madame R is a psychoanalyst, asks if she might make
notes. I tell her she can make a video if she likes. No smiles: you don’t joke
about confidentiality with psychologists.
We tell our stories in fits and
starts: each claims at times to have been misrepresented; the counsellor asks clarifying
questions. A slightly different picture of our problems emerges in the presence
of a third person.
Two more sessions are booked. I
come away no more hopeful than I was at 5:11 this morning.
Rock on.
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