Listen to the author reading this story:
I Indulge
In what a therapist tells you not to do. I rake my hands down my cheeks until I have autumn leaves, pinpricks of stars and constellations that everyone can see. I eat coffee & chocolate sheet cake for breakfast, thinking of the way you touched me in between my thighs, and how you said you needed to leave me. I think of anchors and ships and how, when I met you, you said you were going to sail away on a boat someday. A dog, and you. And somehow, I thought we’d stay floating, forever–
I think of my therapist – a dollar a minute – telling me that I’m wasting time. I think of what I could buy with a dollar each at Dollar Tree, from those times I was almost (starving, hollow, leaden.) I could make gnocchi with cheap sauce (2 bucks). That was when everything was priced exactly the same. She coos to me: that bad habits lead to internal thoughts that lead to conflicts in the outside world– shake a snow globe and pretend you know when it stops–
I never really dated before you. There was a college girl in cornfields, where we made out and tried to discover our anorexia bodies, study under grad school books, make out in offices. There was my RA, who ended up wanting to be a woman. She was there to study the way my body curved, and how it would replicate in their own. There was my high school sweetheart who would kiss me on golf course groomed grass, but I’d pretend (I was perfect, that there were no marks from my mother on me, that I didn’t run to school barefoot–)
My therapist tells me that intimacy doesn’t always last. You have to work on it every day, like putting ointment on my postpartum scars. He never wants to look at them. I don’t either, but that’s not something I can do–
I binge watch Gilmore Girls, watching coffee and junk food pass through pretty girl lips. I laugh at adult cartoons, and wish I had sour gummy worms that I could plant in soil. I imagine my single apartment with rose-tinted glasses. I grab onto my couch cushions, pretending that we can hold onto this life the way it is, so that it stays exactly the way I want to—
The therapist clucks, ticks her pen. Telling me to think again.
Your eyes waver, mine never do. I put the razors away, but I don’t want to. I indulge in putting too many pretty shirts in my queue and then deleting them. Going to the thrift store, instead. Thinking of all the lost story arcs and the dead people that made these clothes here. The potential bankruptcies, the moves, the jacket that reminds them of somebody they don’t want to – and I buy a sherpa jacket instead. I lay under it and count sheep, dream about you kissing my ribcage, my belly when I was pregnant, telling me that forever…
Was the way you said my name. A vibrato. You used to say it with all syllables, almost like a translation. I almost didn’t understand my name, the way you said it. Less
Lie. Less Lies. Les a lie. Let’s lie.
I can’t quite get the way you said it. My therapist says it doesn’t matter how it’s written down in her notes; she’s got it.
I stare out the window, trying to remember the way you put your hands in your pockets,
And leaned back.
The way your vowels curdled, but you didn’t want them to,
When you recited it,
Sweetly, back to me.
Leslie Cairns is a writer living in Denver, CO. She has two chapbooks out with Bottlecap Press. She enjoys writing about mental health. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee (2023, 2024). She has publications in Honeyguide Magazine, Exposition Review, and others.