Letter to my Psychologist by Bettina Simon

 

LETTER TO MY PSYCHOLOGIST

by Bettina Simon

Translated by Kristen Herbert 

The therapy ended, but I still write
the homework for my psychologist.
For example, today I wrote I’m doing well,
though I haven’t gotten over my anxiety
that she won’t read my letters. Of course,
since the therapy is over, I don’t send her
what I write, so that fear has more to do
with the past, but now of course it’s real,
she won’t know what I realized, although,
that’s also part of the therapy.

I wrote about a sea of eggshells in my story
ten years ago. A kitchen scene, two characters.
One washes dishes and cries, the other doesn’t notice.
It might seem like the characters are a man and a woman,
but it’s about a kid and her mother.
In abusive relationships, victims
feel they must always walk on eggshells, I read
in a book my psychologist recommended.

After the mother finishes the dishes, the child
stays in the kitchen, like somebody defeated.
In the writing workshop they advised me to pull from images.
Blue flames, burner. Jar of cooked food between the window panes.
Seven years and clozaphine. The suspicion of the neighboring house.
Mom stirs her coffee. As she drinks it, she watches the stones,
the penguin on the wall watches her. Cold. I also took out the part
where I write about the eggshells.

Translator

Kristen Herbert is native to the Chicago area, but spent several years in Hungary as an English teacher. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. She is a current student in fiction at the MFA in Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside.

Author

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1990. Her first anthology of poems Beach(Strand) received wide accolades since its publication in 2018 by the Attila József Circle. In 2019, Bettina Simon earned a Zsigmond Móricz creator’s scholarship to complete her second anthology of poems. Since 2012, she has been a regular contributor to important Hungarian literary journals, and her works can be read in Prae, Élet és irodalom, and Alföld.