TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Birke

Birkegrimaced at theseunwanted thoughts. Push those unwanted thoughts away , her therapist in Vienna told her. They are just ruminations. When you are feeling one of these “bouts,” try to notice them and fight them away. But what if all of my thoughts are “ruminations?” Birke asked her therapist a fewmonths earlier in Vienna. The room, her therapist’s room, was furnished with a wingback chair—the type that belongs in front of a fireplace with an old man slumped in it, dying. A small palm tree sat in the corner. A portrait of a young woman dressed in the fashion of 19th century Habsburg royalty kept watch on the room with a look of icy stoicism. Her therapist considered the room quite cozy, don’t you think? The hill that she stood on, that she slowly trekked down with the sides of her feet as her father always instructed her to do, was not cozy. The hillside, the mud, the dirt, the bleak evidence of a day that snowed earlier that week, brought a chill with it. But this was a chill deeper, and far more personal than the winter cold that she knew from living in the Corinthian region of Austria for twenty years. Would Thomas feel the chill as well? Thomas supported her in seeking out the cabin. A boyfriend has to support his girlfriend. He told her it was a good idea, that it would help with the process. What fucking process? He said it in the way that someone says something when they are supposed to say something. He believed in processes . His mother’s garden developed as a process . First she planned out where something would go: mint here, rosemary there; or, maybe herbs on the left, flowers just under the first story patio, and then pumpkins and 217