A Room of Their Own by Rakefet Yarden (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📕

“How have the last few nights been for you?”

I was glad that she moved on to a different topic. I thanked her for it in my mind. “Relatively okay. I just don’t sleep at night − that way I narrow down the chances of bad nightmares.”

“So when do you sleep?”

“A little bit at night, and I make up the rest during the day, if I can. If not, then I only just sleep a little bit.”

“Sounds difficult, and not quite like a solution.”

At this stage I started drifting. I drifted away from the room and from my own awareness. Half dozing off due to exhaustion, half staring at us from afar, somewhere else.

I saw us. Me and this Rotem. The woman whom I’d let enter my life, without my noticing or planning it. I saw us sitting in the room. Two of us. One, a serious and concerned woman, utterly wrapped up in wanting to rescue. To save. The other, half-child, half-woman, sad, recoiled, and afraid of her own self. Curled up on an armchair, trying to disappear, and more than anything, trying with all of her might to keep the cage shut. The cage holding the huge tiger within her. So that no one discovers it, so that no one notices her. She suddenly started shaking. The child-woman curled up even tighter on the armchair, trembling, the other woman’s heart going out to her, but the woman had no words, or perhaps the words that she did have simply didn’t reach the other end.

“Dani?” I felt a hand touching me. I shook off the faraway place I’d been to. I lifted my eyes and remembered that I was in a room, at Rotem’s clinic.

I looked at her silently, embarrassed. She handed me a glass of water. I pushed it aside.

“Dani, what can help you right now? How can I help you?”

“You can’t.” I gave the same answer to the question she’d already asked me.

“Still. Let’s try to think. What do you need?”

I looked at her again.

“You don’t believe that I, or anyone else for that matter, can help you. You’re lonely within what you’re experiencing, and that’s a horrible feeling. So let me be in it with you, and we can at least let that togetherness do something. Sometimes we don’t need all that much. Just to be together, and not alone.”

Tears dripped onto my sweater. I hadn’t noticed that I was crying. I didn’t totally understand what she’d said, but something about it moved me. I hated all of the solutions and bland ideas that therapists would always suggest in situations where they felt helpless, and for the first time, no one was trying to offer me any solutions.

I suddenly really wanted to hear what she’s been through, and how come she knows how to be with me without getting scared off by me. I had a feeling that Rotem knew what I was talking about in a different way, but I didn’t dare say any of that. Asking her about herself seemed like breaking a code I had kept throughout all the years of my various therapies. And anyway, it’s not customary to ask your therapist personal questions about themselves. That in itself has always seemed strange to me. How am I supposed to share my most private matters with a person about whom I know nothing? Not even if she’s married or has kids, what she likes to eat, what book she keeps on her night table.

She then intrigued me even more. As though I’d shifted my mind away from myself and my own issues, and a desire arose within me. A desire to get closer to her, get to know her and hear about her life. Understand what she’s been through, how she grew up, what was it that made her who she is to enable her to be with me.

I wanted to ask what names she’d chosen for her children, if she has any. For some reason, that seemed like the most intimate question of them all, its answer teaching us about the person, about their dreams, their hopes, the things that matter, their tastes − much more than other subjects. But I didn’t dare say any of that. I could hardly admit it all to myself. Instead, I heard myself saying in venomous frustration, “What kind of togetherness can we possibly have? The session’s going to end in two minutes, and I’ll just go back home with all of this shit and try to keep living.”

“True. But you’ll take this feeling along with you, and I’ll take it with me too. You spend the whole week alone with yourself, needing to live with all of this inside of you. It’s a temporary period and it’ll pass, but right now I suggest that we continue meeting twice a week. I want to see you more, and we can also set telephone conversations in between sessions. Do you think that can help?”

I didn’t answer. I left her words hanging in mid-air. She wasn’t facing me helplessly. I wanted to get up but I couldn’t. I looked up at the clock on the wall.

“It’s all right. Take a few minutes for yourself. I still have time.”

Rotem

We grew up in Kiryat Shemona. My very first memory is Emily on my third birthday, grabbing hold of me over the balcony rail, stopping me from jumping down.

I’d waited for that moment for the entire year, with the patience of summer-born children. That moment at the end of the party, after all of the guests had gone home. They sat there, on the large dining room table near the entrance to the house, waiting just for me. My presents.

The largest was at the bottom, and the smaller ones were piled up over it. After opening three boxes of colorful chalks, four packs of marbles and one hairband there was only the big box left. Inside it, within protective bubble wrap, were the long-awaited round, colorful glass