That particular Saturday, I was given a dress and told to put it on. I was going to join them. When I found out, just hours before, I was flooded with an excitement so intense it felt like terror. Now it was my tiny head ducking into the car. I was so overcome with emotion as we got into the taxi that I wanted to scream. I looked up toward the windows of our tall building, reflecting the sunset, as if to tell the ghost of me standing there, I’ve made it.

“What would she have said?” Freud asked. “The ghost of you?”

“She would have said, Calm down.” A warning.

My father had told me to calm down when I was in these moods so often that by this point I’d learned to say it to myself. After one temper tantrum, he had given me a rubber band to put on my wrist and instructed me to snap it against my skin when I felt on the verge of the next flood of emotion. Was I wearing a rubber band that night? I couldn’t remember. I did remember thinking those words—calm down—as I looked out the window of the taxi. The city rushed past, red neon bleeding into yellow into green into blue. A mother, bent forward, pushed a stroller, tendrils of her hair floating in the summer breeze. The sky was orange feathers. Two parents took their child between them, one hand each, and swung him high over the sidewalk. His laugh ricocheted off my window.

Calm down, I told myself, calm down.

The Metropolitan Opera House rose shimmering into the twilit sky. There were its five arches. In the dark of impending night, a chandelier shone through the center pane; on the edges, in the arches that made up the building’s pinkie and thumb, two bold tapestries beamed out into the evening. At once, the fountain in front of the building shot upward, a sharp jubilant spray of light. In my memory, a little girl stood silhouetted before it, her feet planted wide, her arms thrown into a V, the black lines of her small body making a snow angel in the expansive summer night.

“Is that what you wanted to do?” Freud said.

“Yes,” I said, and in the moment the word took shape, I felt a stunned certainty that the little girl had never existed. There she had always been in my memory—her silhouette, bold and free, as I walked beside my parents. But—

“I have this strange feeling I’ve imagined her,” I said to Freud.

“Why?” He shifted behind me, but his hands remained in place. I pushed my head into them; he pushed back, holding me in.

“Because that’s exactly what I wanted to do.”

I wanted to run up to the fountain and throw my arms wide, holler into the air. The centers of my palms itched with anticipation and I made fists, scratching my palms with my fingernails, trying to contain myself. My shoes clicked on the concrete. My parents, walking right next to me, felt far away. Let me go! I thought. Let me explode! I wished to grab their hands and have them swing me back and forth, back and forth, like that boy on the sidewalk, then shoot me like a catapult over the bursting white fountain and right into the palm of the building, beckoning me toward it, waiting to catch me.