according to a therapist's smartest client

two nights before new year’s eve, i got a call from a distant cousin in new york at 4 am. this “cousin”, whom i’ve never been quite sure how i’m related to or if we really are related by blood at all, was an omnipresent character in my childhood. he also had a less pervading brother who had vitiligo, a cut of white on his upper lip, and they both had slightly high pitched voices and maybe also a rift between them. i say this because the brother was rarely ever there at birthdays or family gatherings, and when i try to picture him in my childhood, he is missing from the birthday party where i had a guitar shaped birthday cake. my only recollection of him is a photograph i’d seen in my family album of me as a toddler with the two of them. i might even be forging my memory of this photograph altogether because my only concrete memory of him is from when i was much older, when i was 11 and we went on a vacation and he was somehow, of all places, in italy.

there, he gave us daily tours of parts of rome, and one time when my dad said no to something i wanted from the vending machine, he gave me a coin so i could have it. before we left, he gave me my first ever wrist watch, and he said it cost 50 euros. it was a dual watch with hands and an lcd display that both showed the same time and a red leather strap. at 11 my favorite color was orange, but the watch still turned into my prized possession, and i was awfully grateful to him for the gift. after returning home, i still hadn’t been able to fully grasp his apparition. he said he had a wife back home and a culinary diploma from malta, but he worked at the local florist, and he had made my parents read bengali poems that he had published in a diaspora magazine, which he carried around with him. my parents were less than impressed with his creative ventures, seeing him as wayward, as most older desi relatives do with people who don’t become a civil servant or an engineer or who don’t have children, and at that age i thought the poems were about his wife because his wife had asked for a divorce.

the cousin who had called and is now in new york, on the other hand, had also disappeared before i entered adolescence, and then near the end of high school, i heard from my parents one day that he had made his way to america. i remember being a little surprised because he did not have a college degree and i wondered what he was doing there, but i did not pry. he was suggesting that i apply to SUNY because he had seen chinese and arab students there and he reckoned i would fit in as well. when i did go to to new york for my study abroad semester, he added me on facebook, and i saw that he would sign off all his texts with MANHATTAN, NEW YORK, USA. i would show it to my friend and laugh. i saw him a few times there, thousands of miles away from home where i’d last seen him over a decade ago, and he would drive up in his car and tell me that he now had his own car and i should tell him any time if i needed anything. our meetings in his parked car outside my dorm never lasted longer than 2 minutes.

this time, i picked up his call at 4 am not out of familial bond, as bad as it sounds, but because the city where i live now is in my head a stark and constant contrast to new york, and i simply just wanted to talk to someone from that other city. he asked about my parents, and without prompting told me how bad the snow was. i asked how he felt about mamdani’s election. he embarked, with little need to conceal racial prejudices in the presence of kin, on a tirade on how mamdani had peddled to the poor and the illegal immigrants, that he was an indian and could never be as strong as trump. trump, he affirmed, was doing a great job deporting mamdani’s crowd, “cleaning the place up” before he left office. i made a half-spoken objection about trump being racist, to which he retorted that the issue had never been systemic. its always the immigrants who are up to no good, those doordashers. “i do good by others, i don’t harm anyone, and i’m doing well.” before we hung up quarter of an hour later, i was reminded once again that he had a green card and that i should spend more time with my aging parents.

for a while id been desperate for a change of scene, and with my apartment hunt nearing almost 2 months, i gave in to an ad looking for a flatmate. i wasn’t happy about sharing an apartment, but i thought i could still keep looking while i lived there temporarily, so i showed up the next day with my friends to check it out. the uber probably missed 5 turns before we found the guys who’d posted the ad who then led us to the garage of the apartment building. there was a bundle of rebar, which exactly 6 unusually large chickens stood atop, completely motionless, facing the wall. i would only come to know they were alive because when i went to pose next to them for a picture, one of them moved. the entire scene had enormous potential as a backdrop in a stanley kubrick film. a stairwell without banisters took us up to the first floor apartment, and it was like in the pictures, just about alright, maybe even more sunlit than i had expected. looking at the street outside from the narrow balcony gave the impression of looking through a telephoto lens; everything just a little too close to everything else. i looked around because it was the polite thing to do, and then turned to the guys. we locked eyes, shared a moment of unease, and i told them i’d let them know on the phone. we left without having asked my almost-flatmates any questions.

i had not anticipated, however, the neighborhood that this apartment was in and the dent it was about to make in the sort of insulation i had so far only deliberated on academically. i thought about how i had been so cozy reading george orwell’s description of pre-WW2 yorkshire in the road to wigan pier and had even given it 4 stars on goodreads afterwards. on the way back, i went non-verbal reconciling what i’d seen, and then i would eat my japanese fried chicken silently when we sat down for lunch and remained quiet for most of the uber ride afterwards. throughout the events, my friends talked non-stop about bumble. we listened to a voice note of some guy’s off-key singing and i also learned that one of her matches had asked my friend for money. one of them pulled out gemini to generate a response to a text, to which the guy replied in near-perfect chatgpt diction. at a brief natural pause in these jubilant happenings, my friend asked me to sign up for bumble. i mumbled i couldn’t muster headspace for anyone else right now. “are you saying you don’t have bandwidth?” they sniggered at this inside joke, to which i had nothing to say. nor do i have anything to say to my almost-flatmates i haven’t called back.

when i look around now i find that nearly everyone i know is in very different places in life. i asked my therapist if she thinks i too could’ve been elsewhere if i had gotten a degree in something i was more interested in. she paused for a second, then said maybe. maybe not. she said people who study history and get research jobs as historians are far too few compared to the number of history graduates. i could’ve studied history and ended up working at a bank, and then my circumstances would’ve been practically the same. hearing about the plight of history graduates, i felt suddenly relieved, and i happily conceded that i was indeed out of touch with their not so romantic realities. i like my therapist because she seems to speak my language, somehow reading between the lines and connecting the dots even when i trail off with it doesn’t matter. since my goal for 2026 is to engage less in self-narration, its nice that she can understand me in so few words.

reading the journal entries of eve babitz, i realized that mine are all aggressively inward looking, while hers had far fewer sentences with first person pronouns but still reveal greater insights into her being. for example, i met my friends from high school for lunch the other day; 2 of the 3 now live in different countries but are home for the winter, and one of them brought up how we once rescued an abandoned kitten after school. i have no recollection of the events because almost all my memories from back then are sadly of my feelings. in my first meeting with her, my therapist asked me to tell her about myself. “i can connect with people wherever i go.” “but it’s not important that you do that,” she immediately corrected. “i get along with people really well.” “so we keep our anger to ourselves?” she clarified again. i had nothing to counter her with save for an unspoken realization that it was time to let it go. i called my friend to tell her that my therapist said that im her smartest client. my friend replied her lebanese therapist had also told her the same, and i wondered if my therapist lies to me as well.