Anya came to me before my practice went digital. That was back when I had an office with a big oak desk which I tried not to sit behind, because its presence created a power imbalance between my patients and I. The desk signified authority, and people don’t trust authority figures with their secrets.
I always suggested the set of burgundy leather armchairs in my office instead. With no obstructions, I could read the totality of their body language. The chairs functioned as a test of behaviour. Some people would arrange their legs in a half lotus position, while others stayed tight and upright, their vertebrae stacked straight for entire 50 minute sessions.
When I first started seeing her, Anya had come to me so tightly wound that she would curl into a ball, physically shaking at times. I’d marvel at how little room she took up in the cradle of the leather seat. She had asked my secretary to pencil in bi-weekly appointments for her, because she had “a lot of things to work out.” Generalized anxiety, for one. She was a nervous wreck, riddled with fixations and compulsions. She’d talk about the corrosive stress she felt to be poisoning her inside out. This apparently made her both less capable as a person and less pleasant to be around. Initially, she begged me for pills to make it stop. Throughout our sessions, I would catch her eyeing the mini-fridge of prescriptions I kept in my office.
Here’s a moral dilemma of psychiatry: Most people want a quick fix. I know doctors who prescribe their patients a buffet of meds, a whole fruity cocktail of uppers assuming they could make any breathing thing happy. I cringe on behalf of ethics, at the blind reliance on modern medicine.
I’d like to think that I subscribe to a mosaic of psychiatric theories. This, I've learned, deeply frightens the scientific community. My unorthodoxy has since travelled through patients and practices, through hushed talk of my methods and philosophy. Before I knew it, my name had been removed from email lists, digital advertisements, and the sphere of public appraisal. My client base shrivelled, my hours stretched themselves out between appointments. If that’s how it is now, so be it. One thing I’d never do is dispose of my beliefs for popular consensus. People need someone vouching for more human interaction. That’s where the roots of this whole field spring up from, isn’t it? From simple conversation.
I knew that’s what she needed – just to be talked to. After a few sessions, Anya’s body had slowly uncoiled in the leather chair. Presentation is very telling when analyzing the psyche, so I found myself taking notes on the delicate chain she wore around her neck, and how she’d cover her mouth when I was able to make her laugh. Her relaxation was more pleasurable than usual, but inevitably expected. In my experience, women were quicker to get comfortable. I’d like to think I induce this effect organically, considering I’ve always enjoyed the company of females more, on average. Their fingers are constantly on their emotional pulse, god bless them. They monitor their feelings meticulously, in sine waves, like calories or moon phases. They make my job easier! Men, though I don’t like to generalize, are much tougher to crack over time. Plus, they yell at me, which is never conducive to healing.
It’s difficult to accommodate everyone digitally, without any help. For some reason, it’s also been impossible for me to hire an administrative assistant to help manage my practice. When I post listings on job boards, I’ll get a smatter of applications. I’ll pre-screen them, ask the basic questions, ask for a head shot, etc. and hardly anyone ever follows up.
I do still see Anya though, now down to once a week. During today’s call, her Zoom display was freezing every ten seconds, creating choppy interludes in her distress. Here’s what she had told me so far: she woke up yesterday, choked not by the stiff heat, but by her own hypochondria – sporadic, but when it reared its ugly head, all consuming, she had learned. She immediately rolled over onto her back and tentatively fingered the right side of her neck. Just as she’d suspected (and feared), the squishy lump was still there, now close to the size of a golf ball. There was no pain working at her nerves, but when she pressed on the bump ever so slightly, it moved around under her clammy skin, avoiding capture. Anya felt tears pinch the corners of her eyes. She knew what she had to do, which was the thing she had been putting off the entire week: she’d have to drive eight blocks, make a right on Jane St. and try to find parking in front of the walk-in clinic. What Anya didn’t know at the time was that this minor swelling would probably drain itself in a matter of days without any medicine or herbal tonics to aid it (this exact occurrence has happened to her before). But illness-related neurosis already had her in its claws, so out of her apartment and to the clinic she went.
At the clinic, Anya was told that her neck cyst was reactionary, stress induced, probably an inflamed lymph node. The diagnosis calmed her, which, in turn, made the swelling go down almost instantaneously. With newfound vitality coursing through her veins, Anya was in great spirits while backing out of the parking spot on Jane Street. That was, until she felt a metallic crunch: a man had hit the back of her car with the front of his. Recounting this, I could see her getting worked up again on my screen, her front teeth gnawing at her bottom lip between shaky sentences. She was still very pretty in pixels. Oftentimes I was tempted to take a screenshot of her face, but that felt like a breach of privacy.
“I burst into tears the second it happened, because, you know, I had already been so on edge before his car smashed into my fender? Like, I had made all that progress.” Her voice was tinny through the speakers on my computer. The background around her form was blurred, creating a visual fog that augmented the room behind her. I tried to make out a bed frame, a picture hanging on a white wall, without success. Apparently this feature was available to all Zoom users. It saddened me to think about Anya purposely finding a button to press before our calls, in the name of hiding her space from me.
“That makes sense. Well, I’m glad about your neck, at least.” I nodded at her flickering image, where her neck looked lithe, smooth as cream, on my screen’s display. “And then what happened? With the guy?”
“Well, then he got out of his car. I screamed at him, like, ‘What in the world is wrong with you?!’ And it was making me so mad because I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t stop myself,” she pulled at her under-eyes, as if she were wiping said tears away, “And the way he was looking at me, like such an asshole, just staring. I yelled at him for a bit and then he gave me his number, in case I found any major damages, which he said he’d pay for. After that, he just walked off – no remorse, nothing. It didn’t register with him at all.”
“Hmm, I don’t know about that,” I said, folding my hands together in front of me, making a little steeple with my pointer fingers. I gestured towards her through my screen. “What did we talk about?”
She rolled her eyes. “Making assumptions about one’s emotions.”
“And why is this bad?”
“Because we can’t ever possibly know what they are.”
“Correct – Because there are hundreds of explanations for why people do the things that they do. He could have been embarrassed by the way he carelessly hit your car. He could have been nervous, or be cripplingly anxious, just like you are. Or maybe he has high neuroticism in his personality chart. The relationship between men and women is very complex, you know. Cross-gender interaction is the genesis of a lot of psychological problems.”
Empathy is another thing I try to subscribe to – putting yourself in another person’s shoes. Simple, yet so effective. A core tenet of talk therapy.
“You keep saying that, but I still don’t feel better about the situation. Like, I know I’m supposed to give people grace, but –” Anya’s camera halted again as she was talking, her mouth frozen open. It re-formed itself a few seconds later into a grimace, the visual equivalent of a record skipping on a turntable.
“One second.” I said. My home-office – a second unused bedroom – had a small balcony attached, where I kept a litter box for my cat. She was scratching at the screen door now, creating grating noises which echoed in the call’s audio. I got up from my rollie chair to let her in.
“Hi, precious.” I whispered as she scampered inside. A sheet of hot, heavy air shot into my apartment when I opened the door – It was a slimy June day, the kind that makes crime rates spike and clothes stick to your body. As I bent down to pet her grey coat, a drop of sweat rolled off my forehead and splat onto the linoleum floor. I watched her sniff, then paw at it.
“But what?” I asked Anya, sitting back down with a shaking thud.
“There were no major damages to my car or anything, but I still feel really hurt by the whole situation. And my mind reserves space for the boy. He’ll show up in my dreams, laughing at me. Sometimes he’ll have a weapon in them.”
“It’s interesting that your trauma comes back to the boy, not the car. It seems like the accident itself isn’t what’s perturbing you – maybe it’s more the person who crashed into you?”
“Maybe.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but does that mean that you feel a bit out of control? You feel like maybe this person holds more power over you than you think.”
“I guess, yeah – ”
“So consider this: I wonder if this inability to overcome the car crash aftermath has to do with the unresolved closure … you feel like you’ve been disrespected by this vacant man who hit your car …”
Her video stopped, halting my spiel, for a tenth of a second before the screen rectified itself. Anya’s face was a mask of tension, swallowing my hypothesis, trying to digest its implications.
“I guess I didn’t think of it like that…” she seemed weary, and looked down at her hands, beyond the scope of the video display for a second. “Doesn’t that seem a bit abstract? It could have just been an accident, and I’m still a bit shaken up?”
I felt a quick laugh escape me, which I stifled. “My dear, you know nothing about emotion is accidental. I’ve been doing this for many years, and I’ve learned that much.”
She didn’t respond. Instead, she was making small side-to-side movements in her desk chair, rocking herself back and forth. I don’t think this minutiae helped the halting video connection. But it was a self-soothing of sorts. Infantile and sweet.
“All I’m saying is that perhaps… Perhaps revisiting this recounterance would give you more closure. You’ve told me that you’re terrified of confrontation, correct?”
Anya blinked harshly, like she had just been slapped. “I mean, I guess I’ve said that before…”
“Well, maybe this is the perfect opportunity to rectify that,” I said quickly, so she didn’t linger on the shame that often comes with bad therapy sessions. “I wonder whether a healthy discussion session between the two of you, like the ones we have, would clear up some mixed feelings about the event. And you could practice standing your ground, so to speak.”
“That seems like a lot,” she said.
“Not really – You have his number, yes?”
“Yes, I told you, I got it in case of damage costs.”
“Well, what if you reached out to him in an attempted reconciliation? Not one for the physical damage to the car, but one for the emotional damages that have clearly cut deep.”
A pause, a shifting of her position on screen. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that idea. What would that look like?”
“Something informal, casual. What if you asked him to go for coffee? You could air your grievances, and he could air his. You could knead out your subordination issues. I promise you’d feel lighter if you had that experience.”
She was biting on the skin of her thumb, pondering my suggestion. Anya was a shy person; of course I understood that interfacing with new people might spook her. She needed a push from a totem-like figure, a guide of sorts.
“I could also attend, of course, if that would make you feel more comfortable.” I said quickly. She put her thumb down from her lips, frowning.
“I mean… I guess that’s not the worst idea. You would go with me?”
“I’m always free to support you.” I flashed my most professional smile.
-
A few days later I met Anya at an old school diner, a squat beige shack at a highway rest stop. A low neon sign guided me off the side of the road, switched on despite the thick noon sunlight. As I drove by, I saw that the sign had been pelted by debris from passing cars, creating dents and a layer of grime. From the parking lot, I peered inside big yellowed windows, where cracked vinyl booths lined the diner’s perimeter, and a shiny space-age looking bar held court in the middle of the room. Waitresses took their time strolling between tables, wearing those old-school teal and white uniforms, the kinds of outfits diner girls were supposed to be fitted in.
It was a space safe enough to release one’s grievances. Truly, the contemporary psyche was starved for traditional comfort. What was more American than a diner, sizzling on the side of a highway?
Anya pulled up beside me in a small orange car, vintage, which I had missed seeing outside my old office. When she opened her door, an empty smoothie cup fell and bounced off the ground. She bent down to retrieve it, and her denim cutoffs rode up. I saw little blond hairs on her thighs, sticking up this way and that, against her tanned skin.
“Hello there,” I said, simultaneously relaxed and competent (she needed to observe and absorb these qualities, a kind of subconscious pep-talk). I had put on a short-sleeved button up for the occasion, and combed back what remained of my hair with strong-hold gel.
“Nice to see you again. I think we’re doing the right thing here.” I pat her back, which was bare and sticky. She seemed jittery, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Her eyes repelled contact with mine.
“I hope so,” she said. “It’s nice to see you too. But I’m feeling a bit queasy about seeing this guy in person again, you know, opposed to just texting him.”
“Well, no need for nerves.” I kept my hand on her shoulder and let my heart beat hard. “Everything’s going to be fine. Shall we head in?”
Finally! Revisiting the hands-on, shepherding psychiatrist role I knew I was meant to inhabit. Most people don’t realize how difficult it is tapping into one’s mind. Unless you’re an exceptional case, many people need a kind of shaman, an enlightened sage, to lead them through their own mind.
I had wondered who the car crash guy would be, because Anya hadn’t given him much context. Was he a working man, normally aware of his surroundings, but in a careless rush on that sunny day? Or perhaps he drove a bloated SUV, so big that he probably wouldn’t even feel a fender bend if he caused it himself. Smaller cars probably felt like scurrying ants inside one of those behemoth vehicles, anyways. Easy enough to squash – the thought made my blood boil. What kind of man would hit a girl like her with such nonchalance?
She and I walked into the diner together, met with both frigid air conditioning and muted, jingling radio. The place smelt stale, contrary to my imaginings of crackling bacon and hot black coffee. There were very few people inside. I clocked one man with a curly grey mullet sitting at one of the barstools, sipping from a white mug with yellow stripes. A plate of crumbs was perched in front of him on the counter. Behind it was an old waitress, whose string of pearls looked like they were choking her out. They were chatting together, smiling and familiar, the woman fanning her face with a swollen hand.
The only other young person I saw was a man sitting alone at one of the vinyl booths, seemingly wading in his own world, his gaze buried somewhere inside his phone. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Wayfarers indoors. His black hair was thicker than mine. I patted a hand on my own comb-over, careful not to loosen any crispy gel.
“That’s him.” Anya hissed, and nodded towards the man at the booth. We were still standing at the front of the diner, side by side, her head barely up to my shoulder. She stuck her elbow into my side, poking me. Her bone nudged finely between two of my ribs, an attempt to enter the gates of my chest cavity. I gave her a scolding look, paternal yet tender, or at least I hoped, before approaching him.
It took a second before he realized I was standing over him, and he slowly looked up at me. “Hi?” he said, his eyebrows crinkling behind the sunglasses.
“Hi there,” I said, sticking out my hand. “I’m here to supervise this conversation.”
“Hi, sorry, this is my therapist. This whole thing was, like, his idea,” Anya interrupted, popping out from behind me.
“Sorry if that’s weird.” She apologized again, blushing as she slid into the booth across from him, and looked up at me expectantly to follow.
“No worries at all.” The boy said, stretching out his arms in front of him, inviting me to sit down. He flashed me a big, mellow grin, and a spike of annoyance kicked in my head.
And Anya – she was acting so emboldened all of a sudden, apologizing on my behalf. It dawned on me that perhaps it was strange for me to be here. But why, because I was bolstering her confidence during the confrontation? No, someone needed to direct this dialogue. My patient had no real vocation without me – I knew her, knew this from our appointments. But I didn’t like what was creeping up in my body, a hot alien feeling.
I lowered myself slowly into the booth beside Anya, my knees audibly cracking. The boy had taken off his sunglasses, revealing bloodshot, half-drawn eyes behind them. He still looked a bit taken aback, but he and Anya seemed to be on friendly terms. I watched as they smiled at each other from across the table.
“So–” they both started at the same time. The boy glanced at me sideways then looked back at Anya, and they both began to laugh nervously. He was thrumming his long fingers against the tabletop, making it vibrate beneath my elbows. To the left of me, I watched Anya curl her nails into her palms underneath the table, digging little crescent-shaped divots.
“I think… We could start by introducing ourselves. What’s your name?” I asked the boy, trying not to scowl.
“My name is Ian,” the boy said, still staring at my patient with … something. Was that affection? Anya was watching him with an intensity I’d never seen before, wide eyed and nodding slightly, urging him to monologue. I was trying to swallow the growing heat in my throat, but it refused to dissolve.
“And what exactly happened, Ian, on the day you hit Anya’s car?” I ran through my words trying to sound matter-of-fact. A judicial presence. “What was going through your head?”
Ian began recounting the story with newfound animation, as though he couldn’t have been happier about the whole event. He had been spending the afternoon on his friend’s rooftop, the sun frying his skin like the hot dogs they had going on their tiny grill. The air was muggy with sunscreen and marijuana, a perfect medley, for there was nothing else to do that day except laze in their cheap fold out chairs. Maybe they’d play a hand of Blackjack at some point, but mainly, the day would be dedicated to listening to The Smiths wafting out of the amp they had set up in the corner. Ian remembers telling his friend that he felt weightless, like he was floating above the cityscape, and he would teeter over to the roof’s ledge periodically to look down at the jumbled grid of buildings below. On a few other roofs, speck-sized bodies were also crowded around barbecues, dancing to music. Ian remembered thinking that he couldn’t believe those people were real – that they all had their own plans to loiter and do nothing as well.
At one point the beers had run out. Being a gracious and frequent guest, Ian offered to go to the corner store on Jane St. to buy more. His friend accepted this offer with gratitude from his own fold out chair. Stumbling down the low-rise’s emergency stairwell, Ian’s vision was still vignetted around the edges. Colours were darkened, fuzzy and negative, how things get when you spend too much time in the sun. He grasped the handrail with sweaty palms until he finally reached street level. Visible heat waves refracted off the concrete, making him wince behind the amber of his sunglasses; on the roof, he was too high up to feel the worst of it.
“Of course, I shouldn’t have gotten into my car in that state,” Ian clarified, but apparently his drugged-out bliss was also the reason why he didn’t question doing so; his head was tingling warmly and he could feel all the blood in his scalp, racing to massage every individual hair follicle, you know when that happens? (I didn’t, but Anya nodded enthusiastically). What else really mattered besides getting back to the roof, and besides, Ian thought, he was a great driver anyway. He nearly burnt himself on the hot metal of his keys as he put them in the ignition and pulled into the road, without looking, squarely into Anya’s car.
“The sound was what rocked me at first,” Ian said, shrugging his shoulders. He didn’t realize he was the culprit of the commotion immediately. He got out of the car to see what had caused the impact – a fire hydrant maybe, hopefully not some kind of animal– and there, shaking in the front seat of an orange Datsun, was a frail-looking girl. Her hair in two braids, tied at the ends with ribbon. Her face was tear-stained, which he didn’t immediately register, as he was still quite numb and stunned. He backed up wordlessly to survey the damage, which consisted of a few superficial scratches.
“But she was acting like I had just set off a bomb on her dashboard!” He exclaimed, waving his hands, poking fun at her from across the table. Anya giggled shyly beside me.
“Well, she’s a very anxious person. You have to understand that,” I snapped, turning and giving her a hard look. She wasn’t making much progress here either.
“Do you think that there’s any unresolved feelings you have about Ian’s reaction to this situation?” I asked directly.
“No, I don’t think so … that pretty much clarified it for me,” She said, looking at him from under her eyelashes. “Thank you so much for explaining yourself. It all makes total sense. And I really appreciate it.”
“Hey, least I could do. I didn’t think the situation was that chill either.” Ian said. It registered with me that his eyes were rosy because he was probably stoned right then. Suddenly the jingling music became swollen and obvious, its whining like a mosquito near my ear. They were taking turns glancing sideways at me, then, after a split second, looking back at each other. No chance the silence at our booth was my fault, but fine, I’d be the adult here.
“Well, I, uh – Ian, is there any kind of trauma from the event you want to unpack now that I’m here? I’m a practicing psychiatrist, as you probably can tell. Were you feeling anything different that day, before or after you hit my patient’s car?”
Ian scoured the horizon beyond the window with a deep focus, like he was waiting for a response to speed by on the highway. “Not really, man. I honestly just think I was super fried.” He finally said.
He shot us both a stupid, lazy smile from across the table, rows of white teeth, and Anya sank a little bit further into her vinyl seat. It was becoming apparent to me that my patient had gotten stuck in a flytrap of ulterior feelings while organizing this meeting, and was, perhaps, smitten with Ian, the boy who smokes enough marijuana to crash into peoples’ cars. I felt pinpricks scald my throat and a burning need to evacuate the booth, the diner, the vicinity.
“Okay, ah, if that’s all, I guess my expertise isn’t needed here. Would it be alright with you both if I got going? I do have an appointment later this afternoon.” I did, but I was almost positive my other patient was not going to show up. In fact, I was planning on cancelling on her if this diner meeting had gone smoothly.
Neither of them responded, sucked into a standstill, edging into each other’s orbit. I slowly pressed my hands on the table to propel myself up.
“I think that we’re fine. Thank you so much for suggesting this though,” Anya finally looked up at me, and moved her hand closer towards my side of the table. Our fingers were almost touching.
“Really,” she tilted her head towards me so her hair fell to one side, and only I could see her mouth I’m so happy about this.
I excused myself. As I left, I could hear Anya and Ian snickering between themselves. My chest was aching as I drove back to my apartment, where I played with my cat and waited for my 4 PM appointment on Zoom, for which my patient did not show up.
I went to bed, a fitful sleep, where I dreamt of her in a pink dress, making me a sandwich in my kitchen.
I sent her an email the next morning, asking her how the rest of the meeting with Ian went, what her accomplishments were, whether either party found grey-area anguish. Whether she thought Ian masked an intense self-loathing with a thin veil of pot-smoking. In case she was planning on thanking me, I reassured her that the pleasure was mine, that lending my signature stance of sensitivity and competence was the least I could do.
And the day passed slowly, steamily: me re-reading the sent email twice, then once aloud to my cat. Eventually, I drove back to the diner we were at to retrace her steps. Everything was staged as it was yesterday, the same woman with the pearls, chatting with a different trucker at the bar. The sun cooked the vinyl seats we had occupied – it was too hot to sit there for a long time, I thought. I ordered black coffee and imagined the things Anya might’ve shared once it was just the two of them, functionally on a date. Did she go somewhere with Ian after? It was easy to picture them sitting in her hot tangerine car, leaning across the armrests with the sunroof open. Later, alone on my couch eating dinner, I checked my emails once more. I still hadn’t heard from her. Nor the next day.
I hoped Anya wasn’t upset with the face-to-face meeting. No, I’m sure she was fine. She was just processing, which is good, taking feelings in slow, languid strides. Journaling her incendiary thoughts then lighting the page on fire, perhaps. Box breathing in her bedroom. Setting intentions orally while going for a long, fast-paced walk.
After two weeks I still hadn’t heard from Anya, and I had started to get worried. As I’ve said, she had been one of my usuals, one of the faces I’d see more frequently on my laptop. Her negative presence was weighty. I wanted to know how she was feeling, what was making her happy, what had been making her cry for the past few weeks. I sent her a short email, a follow up asking her how she was doing.
She replied almost instantaneously, apologizing for her delayed response, saying she has been feeling exponentially better.
Not necessarily because of the confronting aspect though, she had written.
Ian is really amazing. We’ve been hanging out a lot since we spoke in that diner. I can’t thank you enough for that, for suggesting that we meet up once more. Your approach to therapy is so outside the box, and extremely unorthodox (in the best way possible).
So it wasn’t my methodology that sent her away. Good. I couldn’t bear to think of her feeling like a lab rat.
She continued: Because she had been spending so much time with Ian, she has been slowly introduced to his lifestyle habits.
We’ve talked about lifestyle, why it’s so important to incorporate the holistic, that there’s more than pharmacology at play here. Take our current overprescription crisis, or as I’d like to call it, proof that new isn’t always better.
She walks outside more, spends more time in the sun. Ian has also put her on to weed, which is apparently a miracle for anxiety and bad feelings. It makes her feel like she’s floating, like she doesn’t have a care in the world. She questions why I don’t prescribe it in my practice. She believes we don’t need to continue our therapy sessions.
Heat in my tear ducts. Pricks just under my skin, in the folds of my arms created sweaty pores, except in my mouth, which had never made moisture before, and may never again. My heart quivered like my two fingers as I scrolled up and down, eyes darting across the blue light again, scanning, fact-checking. My stomach carved itself out and collapsed as I floated upwards. From my ceiling, I saw myself falling into my rollie chair, stuck in time. How could this have made its way to me so easily?
I had never smoked marijuana, nor was I going to, but from up there, I began to think about people who got high. I wondered whether Anya felt like she was weightless, floating, at this very moment, if her head felt slightly unscrewed from her neck when she was with him. If she thought that that feeling was a cure for chronic stress, she had only herself to blame. I’ve traversed many levels of both mine and others’ neurology and the unfortunate truth, the one that I can’t tell most of my patients, is that you’ll probably be fundamentally upset with what you find. Sometimes there’s no total healing to be done – there are only lobes to watch rot, plugging your nose at their putrid smell. Therapy combats the stench, from its position on the continuum of band-aid solutions. It’s a good one, yes, but it can’t work miracles.
But then again, what were they doing together right now? Probably lying by a pool, or bathing in the sun somewhere – seemingly Ian’s favourite, or only, activity – taking turns grabbing fistfuls from a bag of corn chips, Anya sitting on his lap. I thought about what kind of bikini she would’ve been wearing, whether the strings on it could’ve been undone easily, whether she was relaxed and laughing. The shallow lines of her ribs and the discs of her spine, a sight for sore eyes. And then I thought about being a boy, smashing into Anya’s fender on a hot day – into her sweet little car, filled with wrappers and empty cups and her scent. I pictured getting out of my car to see the front of hers billowing smoke. A vision of her in the driver's seat, her delicate shoulders shaking with sobs, her hands covering her face. Her honey hair plaited in two braids with ribbons tying the ends. How adorable. I’d want to scoop her right out of that mess and take her to lunch.