Chapter 19. "Who is she?"
Second consultation.
Xu Yichen got more information about Yi Lingjia's condition from his senior.
At first, I couldn't sleep all night long. Later, my body became thinner and more tired. When I forced myself to fall asleep, I had nightmares. After waking up, I lay awake in the dark and cried silently.
He tried to ask about the dream, but still got no answer.
The third consultation.
Xu Yichen played a Chinese song that was one of the few he knew but liked very much.
"Even if you can erase memories, even if you can copy emotions, no one can control love.
Once I decide to love you, I won't change
You are irreplaceable by anyone.”
Yi Lingjia's lips moved up and down, but he finally fell silent.
Fourth consultation.
It seemed as if winter had arrived in New York City overnight, and the snow came especially early this year. In early December, heavy snow began to fall outside the window, just like the chaotic thoughts piling up in Xu Yichen's mind.
Although he knew that building trust in ESRD was extremely slow in the early stages, he was still a little anxious after seeing no progress in the past month.
This was his first case to be treated alone. Feeling that he lacked experience, he consulted a professor of behavioral psychology when he returned to school.
After listening to Yi Lingjia's case, the professor frowned and thought for a long time before suggesting to him that if the other party is unwilling to speak, then try to observe the patient more and start from his actions.
Xu Yichen's gaze fell on the rubber band that Yi Lingjia had been stroking across from him.
A rubber band. Most likely a girl's rubber band.
He thought about it, cleared his throat, and said:
"This lighthouse on the rubber band is very special." He paused, looking at Yi Lingjia's reaction, "Is this your rubber band?"
Silence. A long silence.
Just when Xu Yichen thought he wouldn't answer, he heard an incredibly hoarse male voice say:
"It's hers."
Xu Yichen was overjoyed, but remained calm on the surface. He guided her in a deep voice and asked:
"who is she?"
who is she.
Yi Lingjia suddenly felt a sense of unreality and absurdity.
Three years together, days and nights spent together, yet now, lost, their relationship is worse than strangers. If I hadn't spoken her name, no one would have known she existed in my life. Until now, in a foreign country, a psychiatrist asked, "Who is she?"
It's a bit ridiculous that the relationship between people is so fragile.
Her fingertips unconsciously wrapped around the rubber band with the lighthouse printed on it. Who is she?
She is Ke Fan, she is my...ex-girlfriend.
No longer deliberately avoiding thinking, this sentence slowly took shape in Yi Lingjia's mind.
Almost at the same time, a severe colic could no longer be suppressed and rose in the heart, as if a high wall that had been maintained with great effort collapsed in an instant, and debris rolled to the ground everywhere, revealing the wounds all over the body of the person behind the wall.
He knew very well that something was wrong with him.
In the six months since the breakup, I have been in a daze every day, and the clothes that used to fit me are becoming emptier and emptier day by day.
It’s not that I don’t want to get better, but if I talk about it and try to relieve it, there will be no connection between them.
The moment he lets go of her, she will become a passer-by in his life.
This realization caused him great pain.
So he would rather think about her all night long and feel pain all night long. He felt that she was truly by his side and in his life.
I would rather keep the memories in a self-torturing way than forget them.
Snow was falling outside the window. Xu Yichen heard the boy opposite him muttering:
"She's a very important person in my life."
*
Xu Yichen gradually understood the whole story.
They met in college and he pursued her for six months.
"I've never met a girl like her, always calm and serious. There are so many people in the library, but I can always find her at a glance..."
A fair and gentle girl slowly emerged in Xu Yichen's mind. She was like a tall pine tree, immersed in her own little world, slowly taking root...
"We were planning to get married right after graduation... We had agreed that my dad would send us abroad together. I don't know why, but suddenly everything changed..."
Yi Lingjia had been smooth sailing since he was a child, but he didn't realize it until he met Ke Fan. He began to appreciate the good treatment that fate had given him.
Every day he was with her, he felt very lucky from the bottom of his heart, and he also imagined that he could keep this luck in the future, marry her and have children. With the support of the family, he didn't have to worry about financial problems:
"When we graduate from the United States, we will have two children, a boy and a girl. If you want to work, you can work. If you don't want to work, I will support you." He planned with anticipation.
But he didn't notice the gloom that flashed across her eyes at that time.
Then things took a sharp turn for the worse, and he still couldn't figure out what went wrong.
However, Xu Yichen found a clue for the subsequent treatment from his intermittent narration.
Emotional Freezing.
(Emotional retention).
The biggest cause of ESRD.
When patients experience a sudden loss and have no adaptation process, they are forced to face the painful consequences, and their emotional processing mechanisms will go awry.
It's like a tape that was playing music smoothly, but suddenly got stuck. It seemed that the machine was still running, but the original sound could no longer be found, and only some meaningless repetitive jams remained.
The patient was left at the moment when the tape got stuck.
What Xu Yichen had to do was to help him take out the broken tape and replace it with a new one.
He needed Yi Lingjia to vent, he needed Yi Lingjia to realize that he couldn't keep the broken tape forever.
We can no longer avoid loss, face it honestly.
Xu Yichen wrote the three letters "ERT" on the paper, held the pen, and slowly raised his head.
"Would you like to talk to me about your dream now?"
*
Yi Lingjia's dream was an endless maze, damp and cold, with every step echoing with a hollow sound.
The scene shifted, and he was standing on the streets of a foreign country. The cold glow of neon lights cast a blurry image on his face, like a distant hallucination. The crowd surged, but not a single familiar face remained. He desperately searched the crowd, his throat too dry to utter a word.
For countless nights, his consciousness drifted like a ghost in one scene after another, and sometimes he couldn't tell whether he was asleep or awake.
Ke Fan often appears in his dreams.
Sometimes he would study next to her, and she would look at him drowsily with some helplessness, and would tap his head with a pen.
Sometimes they would walk home together, and under the street lights, their shadows would overlap, looking so close that he would secretly take a photo.
And there was Ke Fan, whom he had never met before.
She was wearing a pure white wedding dress, standing in the hall, looking back at him and smiling. His heart was filled with great happiness, but he found himself standing in the guest seats, and next to her was a man with a blurred face, with a rose on his chest representing the groom.
He reached out to pull her, but he couldn't touch her. Finally, he suddenly opened his eyes in anxiety and found that there was no one around him. The world was desolate like a huge black hole.
Dreams are a projection of reality.
Xu Yichen spoke slowly:
"I understand. What you saw in your dream wasn't just her from the past. What you're suffering from isn't just the loss of your past with her, right?"
Yi Lingjia's face became paler and paler. He sat stiffly, his lips moving, and tears silently flowed out of his eyes before he uttered any syllables.
What is lost is not just the past.
More importantly, there is her future.
Sitting there all night long, I felt the time we spent together gradually slipping away, and I reached out in the darkness but couldn't catch anything.
When they were in love, the future that was engraved in his heart and that the two of them imagined building together collapsed overnight. It felt like he had lost a part of himself.
I have fantasized about every second of holding hands and growing old together, and then one day all of this was shattered.
Sweet love in the 20s, becoming parents for the first time in the 30s, every scene of walking hand in hand at sunset with gray hair in the 40s... 50s... 60s.
There will be no more.
He had their whole lives planned out.
"I didn't lose these few years, I lost the whole life we would spend together."
Yi Lingjia covered his face with his hands, tears flowing out from between his fingers, wetting the black rubber band he had been holding in his palm. The red and white lighthouse pendant was soaked by his tears, reflecting a little warm light in the sunlight.
His crying became louder and louder, like a hysterical and aggrieved child, sobbing so hard that his whole body was shaking.
Xu Yichen placed the tissue box next to him, but did not comfort or stop him, and let him cry.
The human body is like an emotional container. When it is filled with bad emotions, it can no longer hold good emotions.
He needs this kind of release.
Xu Yichen's eyes fell on the three letters he had written in his notebook.
ERT--Emotional Reconstruction Treatment.
(Emotional Restructuring Therapy).
Through external stimulation, the patient's existing emotional blockade can be broken and a benign emotional mechanism can be rebuilt.
*
After more than a dozen treatments, Yi Lingjia passed the school's psychological assessment and returned to school.
Apart from being a little quieter than before, he seemed to be back to normal.
But during the occasional return visits, his extremely calm mood still made Xu Yichen feel a little worried.
He has only temporarily gotten rid of his bad mood. If he wants to regain the ability to have good emotions, he still needs more reconstructive therapy.
Later, Yi Lingjia returned to China and they had less contact.
But Xu Yichen always kept in mind the first case he worked on.
He also always had a vague feeling that this should not be the end of this treatment, and there might be new opportunities.
Until a few months ago, he received an email.
Xu Yichen pulled out a slightly yellowed piece of paper from the pile of documents Ba brought. On it was the word "ERT" he had written in his notebook six years ago.
To the right of this word is a name, which he repeatedly underlined with a pen to emphasize.
[Ke Fan]
The fair and gentle girl is like a tall pine tree.
A few months ago, it was she who sent me the latest description of Yi Lingjia's condition.
He was sitting in his high-rise office in downtown New York, but he felt the gravity of the wheel of fate rolling over his head.
In conclusion, she wrote:
"If I am his inner pain, can I help with his treatment?"
Xu Yichen remembered again the image of Yi Lingjia stroking the lighthouse pendant on the rubber band.
He thought for a long time, typed word by word, and pressed the send button:
"Of course, we can work together to treat him."
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