We Are the Light(59)

Maybe Bobby the cop grabbed all my letters. It also could have been Jill or a kind and discreet Realtor, many of whom I know through my decades at the high school, because I’ve worked with their sons and daughters. For some reason, I feel like other people have read the letters I’ve written, but—so far—no one has said a word to me about them. Like I’ve said many times, we live among kindhearted people.

Gigantic Purple Elephant Number Two:

I’m cheating on you.

I’ve been seeing another Jungian analyst for more than three years now. We do three sessions a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays at eight a.m. As well as Sundays at nine p.m. His name is Phineas and he’s told me that you and he were well acquainted through the many conferences and professional gatherings that all Jungian analysts attend. That’s as much as he would say about his relationship with you, claiming it would be inappropriate to go any further, which I sense he could.

Phineas is more willing to talk in general about Jungian analysts and has told me that a common mistake analysands make is thinking that their analysts have everything figured out and, therefore, are not vulnerable to the darker forces of this world, which obviously isn’t true. He and I have discussed the concept of the wounded healer at length, which sort of applies to me as well. I have many childhood wounds, many broken places inside, but that allows me to feel and understand the pain of high school students in a way that many of their less broken—or maybe less conscious—parents cannot.

Phineas has read the letters I’ve sent you and—full disclosure—I’ve agreed to let him read this one too, once I’ve finished it. He says reading my letters to you made him admire my psyche’s creativity and resilience, which made me feel a little less embarrassed.

“We are all capable of the miraculous,” Phineas often says.

I think it’s important to state right away that I’m not angry with you or disappointed by what you felt you had to do, because knowing you as I did, I’m pretty sure you didn’t make that decision in a fit of passion. No, I believe it was a deliberate, measured choice that you made after thinking through all the options very thoroughly, even though Phineas says we can’t ever know for certain what was in your head and heart when you did what you did. I resented and even hated you for a stretch, but that ugly time has passed. I still miss you, of course. But Phineas has said many times that there is an inner Karl currently living within me and that my inner Karl will be with me forever. And in that sense, the letter writing I was (and I guess still am) doing was/is an attempt to integrate that inner Karl and to commune with the eternal you.

Phineas has been trying to get me to write this last letter for more than three years. From the very start of my treatment with him, Phineas has been adamant about “closing the Karl circle,” finishing what psyche commanded me to start, back when I was so unbelievably sick. Phineas believes this will be “soul medicine.” While, right from the beginning, I very much wanted to heal, I don’t think I could have written these words before now. I truly believe that I’m finishing this letter-writing business just as fast as I psychologically can. It’s been a rocky few years to say the least, which you will see for yourself below.

You’re probably wondering how the movie premiere went, right?

The short answer: it’s taken Phineas and me three and a half years of three-sessions-a-week analysis to fully unpack what happened. I’m not sure I actually remember all of it, because I started to dissociate pretty extremely. Perhaps it’s best to write exactly what I do remember and then you can allow your great sense of intuition and piercing insight to fill in the blanks.

On the afternoon of the premiere, Bess and Jill went to the hairdresser and nail salon, while Isaiah took me out for eighteen holes. Neither of us is a very good golfer, but Isaiah has a membership at the Pines Country Club—where the very kind Greg Coyle used to be the golf pro—and so I’ll ride around on the cart with Isaiah every so often and do my best not to break any nearby windows. On that particular August afternoon—which I remember was hot enough to keep summer’s last cicadas screaming—I couldn’t really concentrate and asked Isaiah if he wouldn’t mind if I just kept score for him rather than play a round myself. After briefly trying to convince me to continue on, saying it would “clear my head,” Isaiah finally relented, and by default I became his caddie—driving the cart and cheering his good shots and writing down his strokes. Isaiah was unusually quiet, focusing on his game, until somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth hole, when he said, “Lucas, I have to say I’m more than a little worried about you.”

Isaiah went on to list a bunch of weird things I had done, like disappearing from the movie set when they needed me and walking around Majestic in the middle of the night and not eating and the obsessive scratching of my arms until they scabbed and a few other things. Then he said, “If tonight is too much for you, no one would blame you. I can skip it too. We can hang out at your house or wherever you’d like. Maybe drive down the shore or something. Just get out of town.”

“I owe it to Eli to be at the premiere,” I said. “And I have to make a speech.”

“You actually don’t have to do that,” he said as he used a red towel to wipe a clump of dirt off the face of his five iron.

“But I really think I do.”

“Why?”