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

over, Mom lost it and Dad drove me crazy talking about my therapist and why nothing’s happening and said that if it goes on like this he’ll stop paying for her because it isn’t helping. He thinks that a few therapy sessions should have already fixed me.”

I didn’t tell Tal that I love Rotem. That it’s the first time ever that I connected with someone that quickly, and that I’ve opened up to her already, and that still this thing, this disorder, is too stubborn. It’s stuck in my head like a tumor, sitting there and not budging.

“All right. Forget about those two. As it is, the only thing on their minds is their work. You’re better off not being picked on by them. I’ll go with you to get checked. Or we can go straight for hospitalization. Why stretch it out?”

She always was a practical person. No time wasted. Everything straight and to the point. But my pace is different.

“I don’t know. Let me think about it,” I finally said.

I got back home completely exhausted. I got into the shower, filled with thoughts, and I couldn’t get the scalding black lump off my heart. I started fearing that this lump would become actual pain. Pain that would indicate that my heart was in real distress, and that this was the end of me. And maybe I’m not at all ready for the end. Maybe I still have things to discover and witness in this life. There are still many more dogs to get to know, and many more animals to find and save. Maybe I’ll actually want to study something to do with animals or art, even if Dad doesn’t like the idea. Everything is better than a sudden death in the shower. A pathetic and unnecessary death. Without having left anything meaningful behind me in this world, and without Miko having anywhere to go. Who’s going to adopt a huge dog with one scary eye and lots of hair?

Fourteenth Meeting

“I don’t know how to go on from here.”

“Go on where?” I leaned forward a bit.

“I don’t know how to stop being angry at everyone, and mainly at myself, for what I’m putting them through. Tal’s taken a semester off and she’s started therapy. She’s remembering things. I hate to say this, but I think that she’s going to get ahead of me on this too − she’s the brilliant student, as usual. She’ll talk about what happened, and she’ll pull me out against my will.”

“Why are you competing with her?”

“Why? That’s the biggest question of my life. Maybe because that’s what we were taught. That was the only way my parents knew how to educate us. Just one single thing in my life that I started before her, and even in that she’ll get ahead of me. And he had hurt me first.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know for sure, but that’s what I think.”

“That’s probably not the case.”

“Why?” Dani asked.

“Because she’s older than you.”

“So?”

“So pedophiles mostly have a preferred age at which they start. Anyone below that age is considered a perversion, even in their twisted minds. You just didn’t know about it, so you only conceived it as something much later.”

“How do you know? Do you have any pedophile patients?” Dani asked.

“No, but I did treat some in prison. They don’t usually seek therapy willingly.”

I remembered Jonathan, a patient who was so scared of being a pedophile that he had to go through a million ceremonies for every sliver of a thought about a child passing through his mind. But at the prison, I met all of those pretty-eyed men who, in the dark, couldn’t control the wolf and had hurt innocent children. My mentor there told me that she didn’t allow her children to sleep over at friends’ houses. “I don’t care that all the other parents allow it. After seeing what goes on in here, I know that you can never tell anything about anyone,” she once told me.

Dani’s voice brought me back to the room. “But I won’t have her speaking to our parents about it. She’ll drag me along and they’ll be there with those serious expressions of theirs and they’ll ask if it happened to me, too. And then what will I tell them?”

“What do you mean? Tell them whatever you want. Whatever you choose to tell.”

“And what about my grandmother?”

“She doesn’t have to know. I assume that your father will feel the same way. It won’t do anyone any good. Dani, you’re the only one calling the shots here. You determine the pace and everything else − not Tal. No one is going to decide for you how and when you choose to let things out, to yourself and to others.”

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” I read a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye over and over again. You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. Sorrow for what? For myself and for everyone. We are all one soul fighting for its existence.

I left the house, riding my bicycle along the street, making my way between all the other wheels, bicycles, rollerblades, and strollers with kids inside them moving across the boulevard and all the way to the beach, where I sat down to drench the waters with my pain. Continuing to do its own thing, the sea wasn’t impressed with me. My cell phone beeped. Another message from Dani, joining the many preceding it.

“Really want to die.”

“I’m cutting myself.”

“I’m taking pills. The whole pack.”

“I have a plan. I’m in pain and I’ve had enough and I don’t want to feel anything anymore.”

I was overtaken by despair. Not despair. Exhaustion. Fatigue. What would Eyal say, I thought to myself. What advice would he give me? I tried to turn to him without actually calling him on the phone. I tried to hear his advice echo within me. She doesn’t want to die, she’s just