She’s too gentle, really. Quiet. We sit. I sit, absurdly, normally, my feet resting on the ground, my hands draped off opposite arm rests. Tick-tock.
It’s such a strange, in-between place, her office —I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. But she’s listening all the same. So I start talking:
A gurgling, erratic faucet missing its aerator, my words land empty, splattered, gone. Coin-flipping for truths, I just wish she would call out the inconsistencies, tell me which patchwork story is supposed to fit. She never does.
And so, the disparities between what I tell myself, and what I tell my therapist, only grow.
I wonder complacently what words have ended up on the floor: in the tile cracks, on my socks, in my shirt sleeves, sticky and itchy on my skin, greedy for the porosity of my uncertainty. What bad ideas have I accepted with the rest? She offers me nothing but eyes and ears.
I know I’ll get sucked down if I linger. Does she? My mind is a slow vortex, round and round and round. “I don’t want to be here,” I tell myself, the nicest lie I can muster, the one I cling to like a shut-off valve.
There is no shut-off valve, I’m just like this. Damn.
You don’t understand, they are right there. I feel the thoughts I’m searching for trying to eat themselves out of my head, it hurts. I promise they are there, and important, I promise I am more than this.
There is one tall window in the room. On the second story, the sun just barely slips past the next apartment, soaking into the old carpet. I refuse to acknowledge the restless smudge that it inevitably becomes in my eyes. Real water this time, I think it spawns there just to insult me, trailing along the underside of the basin. I just have to sit here and wait for it to stop. My hands find each other for comfort, for comfort, they dig into each other hard. Does she know?
My favorite game is to cosplay a mindset of contentment—when intrusive thoughts are foolish again, and I forget these sorts of troubles—because my ignorance runs both ways. “Wait, I don’t even care.” “I’m just being dramatic, sorry.” Sadistic invalidations of my frustration plagiarized from affirmations I no longer understand.
I give up. Maybe it doesn’t help, this placeless place, but I’ll keep coming back to her because…
Once, I got off the chair to lay on the floor. I don’t know what she thought of that either. I can’t say I felt any better.