The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Family Therapy

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I hate family therapy.

I hate family therapy more than any other part of reembodied life. More than my job. Certainly more than individual therapy, as intolerable as that also is. Even more than the occasional guilt-induced lunch Uncle Arafinwë invites me to and my mother and Nelyo force me to attend. I thought I was mostly rid of it—family therapy that is—because I've been reembodied second longest of my dead family, and I think they've largely given up on me by this point. I don't think it's because I've made progress. I refused to go to any therapy for a long while, and when they tried to force the issue by using language with a vaguely threatening connotation, I remember yelling, "What are you going to do, shove me back in the grave? I didn't even have a damn grave!" Instead, they reembodied Nelyo, and I got swept into attending his family therapy because my loyalty to him, it seems, is in the germ of my being, and I didn't want to make trouble for him, even when it became clear that the focus was more me than him, which I think was a shortcoming on their part. Nelyo hasn’t turned out exactly well-adjusted, post-reembodiment. He wouldn't have suffered if they'd let me be and lavished their attentions upon him instead, who probably would have used it and maybe wouldn't look so pale and exhausted now.

I hate family therapy. I'm sitting in it now. I received the letter the other day. Letters used to come on parchment the color of tea with cream; they used to dance with calligraphy and kindle with gold leaf; they used to have wax seals that it was satisfying to break and come via messengers on fast, panting ponies; they were, in other words, special. Letters come now on white paper and in white paper envelopes, sealed with spit and delivered by postal address and a mail carrier who plods through the same route each day. This one wasn't even written to me. It was a form letter—another efficiency developed by ambitious Noldor for my uncle's republic—which I knew because they'd written in my name by hand, in blue ink, and spelled it wrong: Carnister. Thus, insult was added to injury.

Now that I’m here, though, the form letter makes grudging sense. I like efficiency, perhaps more than I like beauty even, and they weren't kidding when they said "family therapy"—the whole family—the whole family that is alive anyway—is here. That much calligraphy would have taken hours. There's my mother and Uncle Arafinwë and Aunt Eärwen, who forsook their various quasipolitical reparative projects to be here. Aunt Anairë, who took a day away from the House of Scholars to be here. Nelyo, off for the day from teaching (and sighing over how long it took to make sub plans) and Findekáno, who is maybe the only one of us not missing something important, come to think of it. Findaráto, away from his burgeoning political career in the suburbs at the Calcirya. Even Amarië is here, and she is doing an important performance art piece, although she's very much still at the wild-waving-around-and-shouting-while-holding-a-drink-in-a-bar stage of the creative process. Even Artanis and her husband what's-his-name are here! Over from Tol Eressëa, where they own the island's largest resort and planned living community. Scheduling surf lessons and balancing swimming pool chemicals are enough of an undertaking, apparently, that even intellectual and martial giants such as themselves can rarely get away. And me. I had to take the day off of work, which is no great loss for my job or for me, but I'd rather be there than here for sure. We are sitting in a big circle with my (our?) therapist between Arafinwë and Amarië. Her spiral notebook is open on her knees; multiple pens and pencils spear through her bun. "Should we start with introductions?" she says.

"Um," I remark, and Nelyo—who is sitting next to me on one side—pokes my foot with his toe right as our mother, who is on my other side, lays a hand on my arm.

So we pass around a talking piece—a glittery stone that my father would have thought too garish and puerile for an infant's toy—and introduce ourselves to each other, we who have gone to war together, gone on holiday together, eaten together, slept together, fought together, fucked together, seen each other naked, seen each other born, in some cases, for the love of Eru (this is why I can't stand this shit). "Carnistir," I grunt when it's my turn, "or maybe it's Carnister now," and, when encouraged to answer a question from the card she passed around to each of us, follow up with, "Pass."

I hate family therapy, but I have mastered using their own rules and loopholes to make the experience as unbearable for them as it is for me, at least.

Uncle Arafinwë speaks the longest, answering the question, "What treasured memory is awakened by the faces you see here to support you?" to wax sentimental about watching our family grow in the years before the Darkening and watching it grow again, gesturing expansively as he speaks. Never mind the small point that many of us assembled here had to die in order to favor him with such a joyfully symbolic experience: Here we are. At last, he shuts up, and the therapist continues.

"I have asked you here today on behalf of the Department of Judgment.” (This is what Arafinwë's government has renamed Námo's halls.) “I am most pleased—most pleased, truly—to be the one to announce that another of your family has been selected for reembodiment." Her face gleams with enthusiasm. I almost feel sorry for the lack of reaction she draws from us.

"Whom," my Aunt Anairë says at last, "should we expect?" and Findaráto—who also aspires to a seat in the Noldorin Congress and has cleaved to her like a tick to a dog—follows with, "And when?"

The therapist's smile wilts a little. "Unfortunately, that is not information that is shared with me."

"Oh hell," says Findekáno, and now it is his turn to be nudged by Nelyo. "Why do you do this, then? Call us all here for what amounts to nothing?" He sneaks a glance at me. We are unofficially allied as the most pointless of the reembodied Noldor and the most flagrantly difficult to manage.

"I don't like to think it's for nothing," says the therapist. "After all—"

Artanis and her husband are already gathering their bags.

"How does everyone feel," the therapist is trying to rescue her session, "about the news that you are about to gain another number? Arafinwë? How—"

"Do we even know which household he—she—they are coming from?" Anairë asks in a voice carefully constructed to be pleasant.

"Of if it is a he or a she or a they?" says Artanis at last in that voice deep and subtly threatening as the sea.

Arafinwë, who was winding up into another speech, is left open-mouthed, cut off by his female relatives.

"Unfortunately, I don't—" and the word unfortunately isn't even all the way out of the therapist's mouth before Artanis and her husband (Celeborn! the man's name is Celeborn!) are rising and beginning to converse with each other about the capacity of an excursion trip out to see dolphins and whether they should increase the thread count in the sheets they use in the villas.

"You should," Findekáno tells Artanis. "Nelyo buys those cheap sheets, and they're dreadfully itchy." He's standing as well, stretching to pop his back. Nelyo is checking the time and muttering about time to grade papers since he already hired the substitute teacher for the day, and our mother is asking if he can spare an hour to get lunch, and Anairë is standing and checking her planner to see if she can make the appropriations vote scheduled for later this morning, and that is the tipping point that makes everyone else stand except Arafinwë, whose lips are still parted and ready to give a speech.

"How about you, Carnistir?" my mother asks. "Would you like to do lunch?"

The therapist, to her credit, has accepted that she has lost the room. I think sometimes about how she is a government employee, like me, except that she answers to Arafinwë's government and Námo Mandos/the Valar, and that makes me feel a little sorry for her. I never believed, however, that her commitment to this job is as unenthusiastic as mine until now, watching her eyes dart toward the door as she considers whether our exodus is foregone enough that she can also head out for an early lunch. Well, maybe not as unenthusiastic, but she clearly doesn't have the personal commitment to this work that I'd always assumed when I was the subject of her particular and regular torment.

As though she can sense me thinking about her, her eyes catch mine, and something like recognition sparks there. "Carnistir! I'd like to see you privately for a moment before you leave."

“Fuck,” I say loudly enough that Artanis’s husband gives me the kind of look you’d give a hibernating bear that has just stirred in its sleep.

My mother and Nelyo suddenly become sluggish and excessively deliberate in gathering their belongings to leave. They are hoping to be invited too, both anticipating that I will cause a row if left alone, but the therapist pointedly avoids their questioning looks, fixing her stare on me, until they leave. “We’ll meet you outside,” says my mother pointedly, as though drawing attention to their presence might elicit the invitation they want. It doesn’t.

“I won’t keep him long!” my therapist calls. We both watch them leave. "We are beginning a new program at Lord Námo's entreaty," she begins.

"Bugger!" is my reply. I seem to be always selected for their attention.

"It is not a therapy program," she says. "It is a mentorship." She waits for my questions, but I won't give her the satisfaction. "You will be paired with this reembodied relative to offer guidance and support."

I laugh.

I don't know that she's ever heard me laugh. She looks startled. But it seems the only reaction that such a statement deserves. I'm barely functional in this body. I have a job, but I hate it and do the minimum to get by. I invent things at home that I never share or want to share. I play horrible, discordant music with Amarië that she views as part of a radical aesthetic, but I just like fiddling with wires and making noise. My mother invites me to dinner every week or two; Nelyo less, but he does invite me; I might as well not exist to the rest of my family except when Arafinwë gets a guilt pang and buys me lunch. I have refused most of the counseling and programs offered me by both the Valar and my uncle's government, even when told they were requirements; they haven't shoved me back in the grave yet. And even though I was dead for the better part of four ages between this life and my prior existence, this existence has really become a continuation of my first embodiment, and by design. No one outside my immediate family really liked me then, and none (Amarië aside) seem to really like me now. And this is because I cultivate the reputation of being dark and weird and unpleasant. I see it as a fence. (I told this to Nelyo once when he complained that I should make more of a point to be friends with Findekáno and I was a little in my cups and so susceptible to embroidering my thoughts with metaphor.) A fence is something that any farmer will be careful to mend and maintain because it keeps his livestock in but also keeps the interlopers out. This is my fence.

I am no way prepared to guide another soul through a new chance at life when I've plopped myself down on the road and already given up. Even if I was, there is nothing that could interest me less.

Intuiting my objections, the therapist goes on. "You were chosen, according to the Department of Judgment, because your particular proclivities align with those of the reembodied fëa." And I laugh again.

No one aligns with me.