Flat on my back on the floor, the hypnotherapist on Zoom beside my head, I concentrate on convincing myself this isn’t weird at all.

In fact, it’s familiar.

It’s a guided meditation. Except for the part when I talk, that is. What she calls trance, I call me rambling on without a filter.

“We’re going deeper,” the therapist says. “We’re telling your conscious mind it’s okay to remember.”
She suggests I talk about college, since that’s the time period where my mentor is trapped.

THE INDIVIDUAL SESSION feels like a guided meditation, but the process is a research project, which excites me. Turn me loose in a data base, the more complex, the better. There was a multi-year passion for Ancestry dot com, until I hit the wall of enslavement.

To search for my mentor, who passed into ancestor status last year, I dig through a data base called the subconscious.

A deep dive into an academic search engine had led me to The National Institutes of Health, The American Psychiatric Association, Psychology Today, and the Mayo Clinic. According to the research, hypnotherapy has been effective in recovering lost memories.

My energy markers were all on board. My chakras had approved and passed the go-ahead to my fascia, which voted yes, before informing my aura—the entire population of Dawn aspects endorses hypnotherapy by unanimous consent.

The door had opened easily, with a casual comment to a trusted friend/writer/life coach/intuitive.

“I’m looking for a hypnotherapist,” I’d said.

“I know one. Here’s her contact info.”

The therapist, it turns out, lives twenty miles from the town I grew up in—home during my college years. At our initial consult, I like her immediately. She feels kind.

The contract listed the price on a three-session package, and my mind had said whoa, never mind, way too expen—. Before my mind could complete the objection, my fingers had already found Venmo.

WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES, the afternoon sun burns a window-shaped afterimage onto my lids. Our session cruises along, the therapist cooing that I will soon start speaking … anything at all … that comes to mind … about college.

I’m completely at ease, feeling a little naughty for taking this time to ignore my to-do list for something so illogical. Naughtiness heightens the pleasure.

I’m completely at ease until she says, “We’re letting the little girl know it’s alright, that she’ll be safe.”
I stiffen. Oh, hell no.

Internally, the pissed off Negress puts hands on hips, squares her shoulders. I had told the therapist, “Specifically college;” I’d given no permission to go into my childhood. No permission. I’m looking for Dr. Agnes Jackson, not this little … I feel betrayed and manipulated. The rage almost drowns out a tiny ping at the corner of my left eyebrow.

Externally, a different story plays out. Because it belongs to a rational composed adult engaged in a psychological research project, my voice controls its anger. “I’m soooo uncomfortable. I do not want to talk about the little girl. I do not want to go where she is.”

A corner of conscious mind has noted my reaction, surprised at the intensity.

The therapist slides past TLG, smooth as silk. Her tone remains kind. No hint of judgment or impatience.

Oh, she’s good.

Conscious mind now trusts her even more.

After an hour, she brings me back. “5-4-3-2-1,” she says. “You are fully present, refreshed.” “You’ll have vivid dreams now,” she says, “memories will come when you’re not trying, like when you’re cleaning house.”

I look forward to dreaming and to not trying to remember, which will result in remembering.

Days pass. I’m disappointed. Where are my vivid dreams?

I play an audio file that she’d emailed and I’d forgotten. Lying on the bed, I relax into the recorded session, as kundalini energy sends tremors through my body, the way it does in meditation.

When the audio aproaches the little girl, nausea sours my stomach, and the corner of my left eyebrow pings. The spot where migraines originate, but these days, education and behavior changes have reduced the number of migraine triggers to two: weather and shame.

Shame. Conscious mind takes note.

Like an unproductive cloud, the threatened migraine dissolves.

A week later, I replay the session, lying on the bed. “We’re letting the little girl know …” Ping turns into stab. My left eyelid grows heavy as concrete, even though my eyes are closed already. My eyelid is glued shut. I want to turn the audio off. Though, I swear I’m about to vomit, the body erupts in volcanic sobs. The body heaves, wails, snots, and shudders. And then the body settles, as the audio file winds to an end.

Another week passes before I replay the session. “We’re letting the little girl know …” The eyebrow pings. I leap from the bed, scream obscenties at the therapist, and throw the laptop across the room. I want to weep. In reality, I lie still, crushed under a heartache that feels like the house has collapsed on top of me.
I’ve been told I’m tenacious. The next morning as soon as I wake up the thought occurs to me that today I’ll replay the--

Ping.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.
******

“It took time for me to see that the story really was my greatest power.”
———Ta-Nehisi Coates
——--The Water Dancer

I tasted the bile rising, as I waited for the online author reading to begin. A national tech company had scheduled me for their black employee affinity group. What did I have to say to these thirty-somethings? And younger. My essays were the experiences of a seventy-something. To them a grandmother. A great-grandmother. They would tap their fingers, impatient at the deadlines clogging their inboxes. No, it wasn’t email that was clogged; it was Microsoft Teams, a platform? application? I hadn’t used before this occasion. I would embarrass myself into a cliché by not being able to work the technology.

One by one, they popped into squares, until a couple dozen populated my screen. Each clung to a dog-eared copy of Blindsided. A few clutched it to their hearts. Someone brought her hand to her chest and mouthed thank you. Another, sad-eyed, shook her head in slow motion. In every window, sticky notes fringed the edges my book.

When my mind reaches for the memory of Dr. Agnes Jackson, it closes around empty space. Agnes aches like a missing limb.

I’m ashamed of not remembering her, because my oldest friend from college is reverential when she speaks of Dr. Jackson. Yolanda’s comments are intertwined with intimate details about me. “You never missed Agnes’s class … Agnes really challenged you … Agnes said you were a writer.”

I ache for Dr. Agnes Jackson because she saw me at a time when I was invisible to myself. I ache for her because she died before I understood her memory mattered. Before I could thank her.

I ache for the young woman whose potential she nurtured.

Dr. Jackson arrived at the Claremont Colleges the same year I did. I matriculated to Pomona, and she was was hired as the first tenure-track Arican American professor at Pitzer, both of us products of Affirmative Action. Dr. Agnes Jackson created the Black Studies and Womens Studies departments.

I dissociated.

A failure of episodic memory, dissociative amnesia is related to childhood trauma—the grocery list of assaults on our innocence that little ones survive as best we can.

The college years did not make it into my conscious mind. If I cobble together Yolanda’s memory and my yearning, I’ll find myself as well as Dr. Jackson.

I find an image of her online, dated 1974. The professor’s face is studious under an Afro like the one I wore in the ’70s. She’s sitting in a living room, among girls wearing clothes I would have worn. I imagine any mentor of mine would have had soft kind eyes; hers look stern. I wait in vain for a twinge of recognition.

I’m jealous of those girls. They have memories that should be mine. I trim them out of the photo, print it, and set it on the desk beside my laptop.

Pomona College research habits lead me to websites for Psychology Today, The National Institutes of Health, The Mayo Clinic, and The American Psychiatric Association. They point in the same direction. My memories can be recovered.

My jaw drops, and I put my hand over my wide-open mouth, holding on to the happy surprise.

Research reveals hypnotherapy is effective. I schedule three sessions.

I quiz Yolanda. We took Dr. Jackson’s class when we were sophomores or juniors. My sophomore year is the only year I smiled. There were parties in our dorm every weekend, and I loved to dance. Yo asks, “Remember the hot pants party?” I do, I do!

My memory circles Dr. Jackson.

More research indicates a direct connection between music and memory.

I Google soul music 1971. It’s a gold mine. Billboard calls 1971 a brilliant year in R&B. James Brown’s “Hot Pants (Parts 1, 2, and 3)” pops up. Of course we had a hot pants party. (three parts! god, we must have been sweaty.) As the list unscrolls on my phone, I bounce to familiar rhythms and sing half forgotten phrases. Aretha, “Spanish Harlem.” Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On?” Jackson Five, “Never Can Say Goodbye.” Temptations “Just My Imagination.” Chi-Lites “Have You Seen Her?” I immediately download them and create a playlist: “1971.”

I slip a copy of Dr. Jackson’s photo under my pillow. Maybe she’ll come to me in a dream.

I don’t understand this quest, but my energy opens to the possibility of putting myself back together. Intuition says follow the research. Trust the science.

Still, I ask The Temptations, “Is it just my imagination?”