by Lila Zimmerman, MFT

LYING DOWN

I recently started lying on the couch. I had to talk to my analyst for 6 months before I was able to do so. I was afraid of what, I don’t know. The feeling, without doubt, was fear. Something having to do with my insides coming out. For three months, when I imagined lying on the couch, I pictured myself in the fetal position, clutching myself, holding myself together. I felt terrified of being born right on the couch. I did this in utero, too, positioned myself in breech. We know it’s hard to give birth, but it’s also not easy to be born. I was cut out, pulled out, and I still believe I require this kind of effort from another to get things going. I kept hoping my analyst would insist I lie down, force it. But she wouldn’t.

My fears also took hold of the feeling of being lonely, afraid that if I couldn’t see her, I wouldn’t know she was there. To feel alone with another is devastating. And then there is the other thing, perhaps the most terrifying of all, the penetrative togetherness analysis makes possible. How vulnerable and erotic it is to lie down in front of someone. To trust a person enough to not grip every muscle. I’d think about it all week, lying down. I’d think about it on the drive over, while walking up the stairs, and all the way up until I was in the room and sitting upright on the couch, realizing today would not be the day. Sometimes she brought it up, sometimes not. We would joke about it, or I would.

“I see you’ve moved the clock so I can only see it if I lie down, I see what you are doing.”

“And what’s that?”

I’d roll my eyes.

Finally, I decided to plan my recline. “I will lie down in April,” I announced. And come April, I did. I walked up the stairs and into the office and announced, “Okay, here I go,” and I laid down on her couch for the first time in the 5 years I’d been seeing her. My secrets did not come pouring out of me now that I was lying down. The ones I keep from myself, those were the ones I wanted most: new information. But mostly I’ve become a bit of a gossip, gabbing about my sex life. Girl talk. I thought I would lie down and dissolve, but instead I’m reclined as if on a lawn chair, twirling my hair and playing footsie with myself. I watch a tiny spider crawling on the underlip of a picture frame and feel a way I can only describe as okay. A word lacking in profundity but accurate nonetheless.

When I get up, I am self-conscious about how my hair is probably plastered to the back of my empty skull, bed head. As if getting out of bed with a new lover who has only ever seen me at my best.