And yet I was still wet, I couldn’t calm down, I needed to masturbate again right away. I missed Freud, I missed him so deeply it hurt my whole body. “Freud,” I whispered—if he was a part of me, couldn’t I call him to me? But nothing happened. “Freud,” I tried again, “can you come back? Please? Come here and just talk to me, I promise not to touch you, I promise not to touch myself, I’ll just lie here and talk, just please come back…“

And yet he didn’t. I felt like sobbing, and instead punched my fist into the bed, then spun onto all fours and began pounding my pillow, hooks and jabs into the silence. Fuck you, Freud, fuck you for leaving me! Fuck you! And then, finally, I could just cry.

What if I could never get him back? Was I destined—doomed—to be forever alone?

Only the day before, I had sat outside his office, unable to reenter. Was he real? Did it matter? I didn’t want to know; I couldn’t know. Not yet. But something else was increasingly and inescapably clear: something had happened that I could not control, something I could not even understand.

Despondent, I pulled the computer back onto my lap. There was his face, so like the one I knew. My Freud. What did I have left? Only this image of him? Then I wanted a million of them: I would plaster his face all over my walls. I would find every photo of him—I typed “Freud” into the search bar, then pulled up his face in tab after tab after tab, touching myself underneath the computer, its flat surface hot against the back of my hand—

See someone.

The words arrived as I came, not from my parents, not from Jojo, but from me.

See someone. As in: you are not the only human being on this planet. As in: you are not alone.

If I couldn’t have Freud, if I couldn’t have him right now, then I wanted as close as I could get. I knew this was impossible. My parents had said as much: No one believes his ideas anymore.

But didn’t they? I wondered. Didn’t someone believe it? Didn’t I?

Next to the tabs upon tabs of Freud’s face, I pulled up a new one: “psychoanalysis nyc.”

And there they were—pages and pages of them, on and on, more psychoanalysts than I could have dreamed up. I was overwhelmed, whether by the number of them or the relief of knowing they were out there, waiting for me, I didn’t know. The screen swam before me; I closed my eyes and clicked at random. The page that opened had no photograph, just a name and a short paragraph. “Successful therapy depends on the patient and the analyst working together to understand the roots of the patient’s pain…“

Together.