Tape 2, side 1

Today we talked about her father and the way her boyfriends are reoccurring nightmares that always resemble the Sylvia Plath poem Daddy. I'm unsurprised by this bit of information, seeing as her instability in intimate relationships sent her to me in the first place. I have started to condition her to resist self-destructive urges in dealing with other people. The key, I told her, was to listen closely to the things they repeat over and over again. These are the important things, the things that float around in their heads, kept aloft by adipose tissue and a chemical cocktail that even I can't replicate. Find these things, and memorize them. Repeat them over and over again. Mention them in their company as often as possible but never make the inference seem forced. It has to seem natural. Speak as frequently as possible about the time you went to a wedding and saw a clock made out of a wagon wheel, about how you laughed at the same joke once, that you both often wear jeans. It is vital to reinforce sameness, uniformity. That is how people fall in love, I told her. And once they are convinced of it, it is easy to convince yourself that this was how it was supposed to be all along. His thoughts are now your thoughts and the chemical cocktail pickling your brain is full of the same useless, repetitive material as his. This is exactly how things are supposed to be. This is what we talked about until our time was finally up.