“Do you remember going to San Luis Obispo?” Her face is somber but her eyes, as always, are kind. ‘Of course I remember, I was just there on the weekend!’ This is what I’m thinking but the words are not at the tip of my tongue, they are way back near my uvula trying to crawl their way out. I nod yes. “Do you remember calling me from the hotel room?” ‘Umm, no I would remember calling you if I had’, I’m thinking. Her small office is getting bigger somehow, and my feet don’t reach the floor anymore. Unsettled, I shift on the couch to get a grip on my body. I shake my head no. Then I’m gone.
It’s so loud. Everything is so loud. I am scared. He is talking to me, I think. I slowly scaredly open my eyes, and look up. There is an old man sitting in front of me, across the table which is too high for me to reach. He is putting something into the baby size plate in front of me.
“Eat some of my caprese until your food comes. I think your glucose is too low.”
He shoves the plate in front of me even closer. I think it’s going to fall, fall into my lap. He is looking at me in some way, I don’t know the words for it. The words inside me are not what the loud noise all around me sounds like. I look at his hands, there is so much hair on them. But no hair on his head. The top of his head is all round and brown, and hair is coming out of his nose. There is hair on the tips of his ears and where ladies wear earrings, but no hair on his head. I think I know some other mens who look like him, but I don’t remember where.
“Here, you have to eat something, Juhi”.
He picks up a piece of something red from the baby plate in front of him on a fork, and puts it in my mouth without asking. It is like raw tomato, which I don’t like at all. Yuck. Yucky. I open my mouth to spit it out, but there is a tall man standing next to me and it would fall on his shoes if I spit up now.
“Here we go, Ravioli de Zucca for the lady. Eggplant Parmigiana for you, sir. Be careful now, the plates are very hot. Can I get you anything else?”
He is looking at me funny, like the old man who is trying to pretend nothing is wrong. “Ma’am, let me refill your water. I’ll bring over another basket of bread right away.” His long legs move away from me, and I swallow the yucky stuff the baldy guy has put in my mouth. Baldy, that’s the word for no hair on your head. I remembered something.
“Do you feel sick, honey? Eat something so your sugar will stabilize.”
He is talking to me as if he knows me, so maybe it is okay for me to eat the hot ravoli sugga. Maybe it is made from the sugar he thinks will make me tall enough for the table. I pick up the fork that is for growed people, so big and heavy in my hand, but I can’t hold it straight. He keeps eating, his head looking at his food, but his eyes looking at me. I don’t know how he is doing that. I am not scared of him, but I think I don’t like him.
The lady at the tiny table next to me drops her glass, breaking it, and laughs loudly. There is a handle of the glass in her hand. How can a glass have a handle? When I look from where the glass is lying broken next to my foot, I don’t understand whose big lady feet are at the end of my legs. I know they are my legs, because I am swinging them. There is pink nail color on the toes and I know I haven’t put it there. The lady also has bright red nail color on her toes, and her hair looks like the straw in the Jack and Jill went up the hill page of the book I have seen before, but I don’t know where. Now I can hear the loudness. There is some music that doesn’t sound like the radio at home. I don’t know where it is coming from. It sounds like it is all around us, like the air. The people are all loud: loudly talking, loudly laughing. There are so many tables, all filled with people. And tall men and tall ladies with black aprons carrying big round trays all around the room. All the lights are on and so bright.
I don’t know where I am, and I want to go home. The man at my table is looking worried at me, like I have done something wrong. But I don’t remember doing anything wrong, I don’t remember anything. I don’t know how I got here, or where this is. I want to go home.
“How’s your pasta? Is it too hot to eat? Do you want some of my eggplant?”
He is getting stripes on his forehead, maybe from looking so worried. He takes the fork from my hand and cuts a piece of whatever white thing is in the big bowl in front of me. It is like the Papa bowl in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks! That’s what the lady who is also looking at me funny looks like. Those are goldy locks.
“Here, Juhi, you’ve got to eat. Come on, you’ll feel better.”
I open my mouth and he pops the forkful of white slushy thing into it. Oh yucky yucky. It feels like the squishy underwater things someone has shown me pictures of, from whenever I can’t remember. No one is standing next to me now and I carefully spit the slimy white thing into my baby plate. I wipe my lips with the edge of the very big white cloth the tall apron man has left in my lap. The loudness is getting louder and the brightness is getting brighter. My head hurts and somewhere inside my eyes hurts.
“I want to go home”, I say to the old man. He looks like he might know where I have to go.
“Un…hunh. Let’s finish our dinner, then we’ll get back to the hotel. Do you want some dessert?” He is pretending he has not seen my spit white food in the baby plate, but I can tell he has. He is looking at his watch, and trying to eat very fast.
“I want to go home”, I say again. “I want to go home”, and now I’m crying but quietly because crying loudly can get you into so much trouble.
“I want to go home”, I keep saying as I put my face into the white cloth in my lap. When I look up from repeating it many many times, the tall man is at our table, talking to the baldy man. Then he comes back with a bag and some boxes. My head and eyes are getting worser so I put my head down at the table edge. I think I fall asleep. The man tells me we can go now, and when I get down from the very big chair, I am so tall that my head reaches his shoulder. I don’t know how this can happen, how have I growed up so fast? I don’t understand it. I follow him out of the loud place into the street, and fall asleep.
“Thank you for telling me, just rest now”. ‘Don’t you have an appointment after me?’, I’m thinking. But I can’t talk. I put my feet up on the couch, pulling my knees to my chest. She spreads a blanket over me, turns down the light, and closes the door behind her. i fall asleep.
Transcribed from Dr. P. B’s video recordings of patient JkM session 4/7/2010
