The Unit

by Ninni Holmqvist

At that point I had seen him only twice, and we hadn’t touched on anything particularly difficult, but had mostly kept to the surface of my emotional life. But now I was deposited in his armchair in a state where I was completely powerless and defenseless. All my suppressed fear, rage and grief had floated up to the surface and was lying there waiting; all he had to do was help himself, or at least that’s how it seemed to me—as if he were lapping up my feelings with his big, rough, psychologist’s tongue. And he had succeeded in getting me to talk about death, about when someone dies or disappears, like Majken, like Siv, like my parents and other people I had known who no longer existed. Afterward I had actually felt better, it didn’t feel as if he had taken something away from me at all; on the contrary, it felt as if he was there for me. I wasn’t completely sure that this was actually true, for real, but the main thing was that it felt that way.