That’s the other goal I have. To go back to Gavin’s uncle’s studio in Bushwick and finish that painting I started all those months ago. The one of my house. I won’t let Anneliese define it.

Dr. Ihm knocks on the door frame of her office to get my attention, and I realize she’s been standing there for a while, that her previous client has left, the door to the waiting room slipping closed behind him. I get up and follow the doctor inside, making myself comfortable on the beige sofa.

Dr. Ihm is young, which startled me during our first session. She has the open, friendly, unyielding face of a restaurant hostess or hair stylist. She wears tweed pantsuits and heels and always a soft pink lipstick. I haven’t decided if I like her yet. But at least I feel at ease around her, like I’m talking to a friend, a girl I’ve met in the bathroom line at a club, her placid, earnest face absorbing everything I say without a hint of judgment.

We go through the usual check-ins. My oscillation of emotions regarding Anneliese. The impending anxiety that comes with all the unanswered job applications that I’ve put out into the ether. The feeling of vertigo I have every time I step out of the apartment to begin a new day, with no sense of how my life will play out a week, a month, a year from now.

I’d only been in therapy once before, when I was a preteen and my dad had felt like I should talk to another woman about all the changes happening to my body, the mood swings and barbed words I had started to fling at him. I’d hated it. Hated talking about my feelings with someone old enough to be my grandmother. Hated the elderly woman’s skin tags and thin, tired voice, her fleshy earlobes. I’d lasted three sessions before I told my Dad I was quitting.

Unlike her, Dr. Ihm doesn’t take notes. I like therapy with her. I like talking about myself for an hour and not having to worry what she thinks of me. I pay her to listen, and she just nods along to my endless chatter, interrupting every now and then to probe some sentiment more deeply. During a pause in my stream of consciousness, she stops me. “Do you want to discuss the day your father died?”

We had been circling this topic for four weeks now. And I’d said, truthfully, that yes, it would be helpful to discuss it. But then I guess I’d subconsciously procrastinate, and then time would be up, and I’d promise to get to it at the next session.