I Want You To Write A Letter

Original and exclusive short story, just for you

Marla’s office is the small one at the end of the corridor. Just a room with a green oriental rug, two grey armchairs facing each other and a small desk off behind, near the window. On the same corridor there’s a charity that stopped trading years ago, but somehow inexplicably still keeps an office here, they’re never in of course. Then there’s the man with the folding bikes. He did a Kickstarter or something and the only thing you ever really see of him is when he goes to the kitchenette to fill the large pot he uses to brew the strong coffee. Then five or six times a day he’ll scurry to the toilet and return to his lair. Then there’s the office with the ceiling tiles that all fell in, which I think is waiting for the day that the landlord has enough money to fix it up. Then, at the end, there’s Marla.

Marla likes her office because if you’re really charitable, or an estate agent, you can say that it has a river view. It doesn’t matter to Marla that you can only see the river if you actually physically press your face to the windows (which don’t open), or that if you even do this then all you’ll see is a sorry, brown excuse for a river trudging by. That doesn’t matter to Marla. She says she can hear it and that running water is very important for a therapist because it carries the negative energy downstream. Don’t worry – Marla’s not a flake, she’s a good therapist, but she’s fully invested in this idea about energy. But she’s not a flake.

Just outside Marla’s office are four plastic chairs grouped around a small coffee table, which has held the same copy of Elle since she started here. The magazine is picked up rarely but the quiz at the back has been filled in. Marla times her appointments so that there’s a good window between clients, you’d really have to be dawdling or keen to bump into another client. Marla knows that when it comes to therapists, people prefer anonymity, not just of her room, but of the building itself – it feels like it’s one of those liminal spaces that people only really remember when they think really hard about it. For a therapist that’s good. If they needed to her clients can tell people they bump into outside the building that they were calling in on the charity, or buying a folding bike. Oh, is there a therapist up there too? Huh, I never knew.

Marla tries to treat the people she sees as individuals, she really does. But it would be wrong not to accept the truth that there are patterns. As a therapist, you have to try and fight that instinct to see the patterns and make judgements accordingly. Marla’s phrase to herself is that she needs to leave room to be surprised. One truth about therapy though is that people never really come when they’re well. “I’d like to pre-emptively protect my mental health,” is not a sentence that Marla hears much in her working life. Her clients tend to come around when the shit is already working its way deep into the mechanisms of the fan. “I need to deal with my mental health,” is more the shape and size of things. “I’ve not been feeling very positive.” So, the first part of the pattern is that you can see that there is an inciting incident. He lost his job and it all went downhill from there. She had a baby and it’s never been the same since. They haven’t been the same since the accident/divorce/issue with the fence. There’s usually a spark.

The other thing that’s apparent if you sat where Marla does and saw the things she sees, is that the people tend to fit into a type. They have their inciting point and they have their shared characteristics. For lots of people it’s simply that they refuse to see the obvious problem. “But, of course, you’re gay,” Marla has nearly said on a number of occasions. “You are clinically depressed,” is another thing that remarkably few people realise about themselves. “You should kill your mother,” Marla would like to say that more too, but she doesn’t.

“My mother said that she thought my new job was adequate for my sort of person, what do you think that means?”

“Your mother is a narcissist and you could enter into an ill-fated series of therapy sessions and conversations with her, but ultimately it would be simpler, cheaper and probably better all round if you killed her.”

Marla didn’t say that, but she’d like to sometimes.

Then there are the treatment options. Often just listening is the majority of what Marla does. She hears the people and for the hour that she is with them she breathes and is calm and she really listens. She listens professionally. She notes things. She rarely makes notes these days because she’s perfected the art of listening and remembering – but sometimes she does. She remembers these things so that she can point out things to her clients.

“And of course Devon would be important to you because of the link with your father.”

“My father?”

“Didn’t you say you spread his ashes there?”

“Oh yeah, we did. Do you think that’s important here?”

People are not good listeners by nature and it’s getting worse. Try listening to someone while you’re also trying to complete that day’s Wordle – it looks like it ends -TIC? Sorry did you say something about hitting someone with the car?

Marla likes her job. She’s good at her job. In-between sessions she presses the side of her face to the window and looks at the sliver of river she has access to. She blows out three good breaths and mists up the glass. The energy from that session goes downstream. She never really thinks about what is being delivered to her from upstream.

What Marla doesn’t like about her job can be summed up in seven words.

“I want you to write a letter…”

She hates this part of her job because it always feels cheap. Like she’s pretending to be a therapist in a film. The writing a letter schtick is infuriating. It infuriates Marla, not because it doesn’t work, but because it does. With about 95% of her clients it proves to be one of the most effective interventions that she can do, other than being there, listening, remembering and using her brain.

“A letter about what?”

“I want you to write a letter to your father/mother/uncle/abuser/teacher and I want you to be honest in that letter. I want you to bring it to our next session. During that session we can read through it together, or we can talk about the process of writing the letter, that’s up to you – but I want you to write the letter.”

“I’m no good at writing.”

“It doesn’t matter – this is a letter that’s for you. It’s more important for you to get the feelings down on paper and to build some distance and objectivity from those feelings. Does that make sense?”

Of course, it always makes sense because people have seen this schtick in movies before. Marla hates that it works.

When they come to the next session, they usually seem brighter. Their shoulders are less slumped, the wattage of their smile has increased slightly, their eyes shine a little more. In their hand, or pocket, or bag they have a letter. Some of them are already in the envelope. Some of them are scrawled on line paper. Some are the work of amazing penmanship on blue, fragrant paper. Most are typed. Then they read the letter to Marla and talk about how it felt. They often cry and their voices catch as they do it. Marla gives them time. Gives them space to say these things. It’s rare that people fail in the task and if they do it then it’s rarer still that it doesn’t help. There’s just something primal about the power of trapping these feelings that have been sticking in their ribs, gumming up their lips for so long. It helps to put these things into words and stick them to a page. Even reading and participating in the process makes Marla feel better – curse it.

At the end of the session Marla gives the client an envelope and a stamp. Together they write down the address of the person who its direct at and they put a stamp in the corner. Marla then opens up an old mail sack that she took from the charity’s room and asks the client to imagine that they were going to the post box and they were going to actually deliver this letter. How would they feel if that was the case? Some of them shake. Others are happy, sometimes deliriously so. They cram that letter into the sack and stand up with pep in their step and glide in their stride. Damn it, Marla thinks – it’s worked again. When the client has gone, she drags the sack into the corner of her room and folds over the mouth. In many ways that sack represents her legacy – hundreds of clients that she has worked things through with – not all of them were successes, but the letters nearly always helped.

Sometimes, like now, a client will cancel their session and Marla will walk over to the gym, or sometimes she’ll drag the sack over to her desk and she’ll lucky dip her hand into the sack and pluck out a letter. She can always remember the client, often she can remember the writing. The looped, cartoonish letters of Malcolm telling his long-dead mother that he was not gay, despite her being convinced that he was and disappointed that he wouldn’t live a fabulous and gay life. Sintha wracked with guilt at the loss of her baby, and laser-like fury with her husband for making her have the abortion. Marla holds them to her chest and then puts the letters back into the sack. She sometimes thinks that in the pantheon of great therapists her name might not be etched on a marble statue, but she is proud of what she has achieved at the end of her long corridor with its sliver of river and bag of letters.

Marla has very little notice that she’s dying. There’s a thump in her chest, which she thinks might be because she’s recently switched to almond milk in her tea and it gives her indigestion. She taps her breastbone to try and burp, but nothing comes up. There is a wash of heat that passes from one side of her chest to another. She coughs slightly and feels some discomfort. She thinks - maybe I pulled a muscle when I went to the gym earlier? And that’s it. Marla’s heart stops beating and she pants and her face strains and goes red and then she breathes out for the final time. It looks like we’ve come to the end of our session.

The next client knocks on the door an hour later. Marla has never been late for a session before. She always opens the door dead on the minute of their session. So, it’s a surprise when there’s no welcome. Jess taps at the door and gingerly opens it a crack.

“Hello Marla? It’s Jess,” she calls, suddenly getting a pre-sentiment that all is not as it should be.

“Marla?”

Jess sees Marla slumped over in her chair and she utters, “Oh God, Marla!” and then routine swings into action. The ambulance is called. Jess tries CPR but it’s academic at this point, Marla is far, far away at this point. The paramedics don’t even bother when they arrive, just note the time of death. Her body is lifted onto a gurney and wheeled with care and some difficulty down the stairs. She is loaded into the ambulance and transported to hospital, where she is housed in the morgue, with five other people – mostly older people, all dead. The police attend Marla’s office and liaise with the shocked landlord to make sure her room is locked up.

“Wasn’t she only in her fifties?”

“Forty-eight,” the policeman replies.

“God, that’s no age is it?”

“No.”

The landlord to his credit takes at least an hour before he starts to think about clearing out her room and advertising the office. It’s bound to be in demand because it has a river view. Just need to make sure that it’s not known that she died in the actual office. That’s fine, there’s nothing that can’t be glossed over, or given a little spin to make it more palatable. It’s sad, she was a good therapist by all accounts. There’s no justice in this life is there?

To make himself feel better he takes the sack of mail that she had to the post box himself. He wonders why she has all these letters, but only in passing. Not enough to wonder if she wanted them posting. He reaches into the sack, over and over and brings out handfuls of letters and crams them through the slot. Then it’s done. He lights a cigarette and takes himself for a pint. It’s important to seize the day isn’t it? He says to the bar woman. Carpe diem, because you never know what’s in store for you and when your entire life might get flipped on its head.

**********

Thanks for reading.

I don’t know about you but I cannot wait to see this as a Netflix series. Each week it’s one of Marla’s letters dropping onto the doormat of another person whose life is about to change irrevocably. If you know anyone at Netflix then maybe give them a nudge.

I have to give thanks to my own therapist who I recently went through this process with. She wasn’t even annoyed when I told her that I killed her (literarily), which I think is a healthy state of affairs.

I hope you’re well.

Shan x