090718 What if you overheard your parents talking and discovered that they had been sending you to a therapist not because they thought it would help you grow and be strong and healthy and stuff but because they had a list of imperfections they were assiduously trying to sculpt out of you. At one of the more recent meetings, you came back from the bathroom too soon and heard them whispering behind the closed office door at the clinic. You saw through the keyhole your dad was shoveling sheaves and reams of money across the desk, a gleam in his eye, while your mom was saying, “About the only thing left that’s wrong with her is the black and white thinking. If we can shave that off whittle that one down to no more than a smooth nub, I think we’ll be almost ready.” Almost ready? you thought *to yourself* (as if you could think to someone else—hey, maybe you could, you thought to yourself; maybe that’s one secret thing left that’s still wrong with you that *they don’t know about*—delusions of telepathy—good! cherish it! conceal it! they must not know! until it’s time to let it out in the most horrendous way, and *foil their sinister plans!*), Almost ready for *what?* But then there was a scuffle in the waiting room. LITTLE CHARLIE had done knocked over the fish tank, a-GAIN! And so the fish swam out into the waiting room, and the water and the coral and the artificial plants all made a great smooth swooping wave, a muscular rivulet, a great tongue of water, dancing pony-story-book-like across the carpets, the coffee tables, the chairs, the goddamn cats— The water filled the room, up and up, it went over the tops of the comfortable couches, it went over the magazine racks, it went over the picture frames with the ostentatiously not-too-obviously-inspirational abstract paintings, it went up and over the light switches, and there was a spark and lightning branched out all throughout the water like forks of blue sunlight through a yellow swimming pool. Everything was backwards today. You did the backstroke down the hall. You saw your mom and dad and you helped them get out of the office, but the therapist was drowned. You wasted no time on him. You were shocked, you were traumatized, you would probably need therapy after this, but then again and on the other fin, the son of a bitch had it coming. You swam out into the hallway, and the waves were choppier here, and you bobbed up and down, ridiculous with the current, and the current led you around the long square of the hall towards the stairs. Oh no, oh no, oh boy, oh my god, you thought to yourself, here comes the staaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiirrrrrrs!!! And you held on to your mom and your dad’s hands and you all went over the edge together. There’s that moment of going over the edge. There’s that curve. There’s that lip. There’s that undefinable moment where a state of being up at the top becomes a state of being on your way down. There’s that perfect, clear, cool, smooth hump of water that marks that moment. That water is perfectly still and invisible, except when it isn’t, and the only time it isn’t is when a little air bubble appears, or a little fleck of something, and the bubble or the fleck you can track with your eyeball, and you can see the bubble or the fleck moving so astonishingly fast, it’s as fast as a shooting star across the marble-smooth night sky of that perfect swollen swelling muscular hump of water, right there at the edge, at the point of no return, where the moment exists that is the ultimate expression of a life lived in fear suddenly becoming a life lived in honesty. The honesty that comes from exhaustion, from failure, from travesty, from tragedy, and from bleak necessity. The honesty that comes from throwing away a life-sized garbage can full of false confidences, that comes from finally hearing the truth about what your parents and the therapist were really up to. You hold your parents’ hands and you let yourselves all go over that hump. You fly for that one instant on top of the hump of water, for that one instant you are moving swiftly as the shooting star, you are the shooting star, you are the fleck of something, and you are the air bubble, and you ride that invisible power chord of deadly clear blue right over the top, and then that’s it—you’re on your way down. Your therapist’s corpse got stuck in a muddy swirling eddy over by a mop closet. He won’t be coming down with you. The water carries you along like a descending pattern of major chords. You fly, you fall, you slide smooth as a train through dreamland, you slide down that waterslide that the stairs are now, and you ride that ride all the way across the lower lobby and right out the front goddamn door. The water deposits the three of you out front on the sidewalk, and you’re suddenly blinking in the sudden sun, and the water goes a little bit this way and a little bit that way and kind of mumbles to itself and fades into the mossy cracks in the sidewalk and trickles away like a bunch of capillaries in a monkey’s brain, and then suddenly it’s dry, as if there never was any water, as if water is a synonym for memory, and then you’re standing there, and your parents are abashed because they think you were *this close* to being perfect, and bless their hearts, they’re trying to be brave, and you are standing there feeling weirdly grown up because you’re holding onto their hands still for some reason and you’re standing there deciding which way to walk on the dusty sidewalk and you know something they don’t know. *It’s ok,* you think to them, *I was never perfect to begin with. And I never will be. And it’s ok.* And they look at each other and they look at you and there’s a thousand questions they could think to ask, and none of them is any of the questions they’ve paid the therapist for years to ask, and when they look at you you just nod yes, and then they understand and then you ask for lemon ice and then the three of you go get some lemon ice at a little narrow storefront halfway down the block and the guy selling the lemon ice is portly, that’s really the kindest word for what that guy is, and maybe a little swarthy, and you like him, and he smells good, and as he’s dishing up the ice, into little pewter cups, he says, that was some flood we had a little bit ago, huh? *Yes,* you think to yourself, as if there’s any way you could possibly ever think to someone else, and there isn’t, there really isn’t, and there never will be again. And that’s ok.