See Me

55

"There's no right way to feel, Seren. I want you to know that." Lucy peered over the edges of her small framed reading glasses, a small sympathetic smile on her lips.

I remember my first day in this office, my first therapy session. My therapist insisted I call her Lucy, which I rolled my eyes about at the time. Maybe at the forced informality, but also because she's at least 60, a head full of grey hair and her wardrobe mainly consists of brightly coloured ponchos. She did not look like a Lucy, to me at least. I hadn't trusted her. What would she know? What could she possibly know about me? What could she possibly understand about me? Those were the thoughts running through my head, as I stared at the purple butterflies on her shirt.

It turns out, Lucy did understand me. I don't know how, but she did. Sometimes she was able to know what I was thinking before I was thinking it. She could produce valid reasoning for my chaotic actions. She could pull poetry from my confused and unintelligible thoughts.

I didn't answer her, my fingers drumming on the arm of the black chaise I was perched on. I just stared back at Lucy. She wasn't phased. She knew the drill.

"It's okay to feel happy about his death. It's also okay to feel sad." Lucy said gently, her pen was bouncing between her fingers, hovering just over the pad of paper she had in her lap.

"I don't know how I feel." I said finally, looking down at my hands.

"And that's okay, Seren. It's normal, actually. Understandable. Can we walk through your thought process?" Lucy asked me as she leaned forwards towards me.

I groaned. I hated walking through my thought process, as she put it. It was exhausting.

"It will help. You know it will." Lucy reminded me.

Reluctantly, I nodded.

"So, let's go back to the night you found out. What was your initial reaction?" She asked me.

I blinked rapidly as I remembered the moment she had asked me about. "I laughed."

I did, and I felt guilty about it.

"Okay. You laughed. Why did you laugh? Did you think it was funny, or were you happy?" Lucy started writing in her notepad. "And remember, Seren, there are no wrong answers. Your feelings are completely valid, no matter what they are."

"I laughed because it felt like a joke." I said bluntly.

"A joke?" She tilted her head as she asked.

"Yes."

Lucy wrote something down again. "Why did it feel like a joke, Seren."

I sighed. "I don't know. I guess because the detective had just told me that he got away with it, and then in the next breath told me that he died. It's a joke, really."

"Sure." Lucy was looking at me the way she usually does when I say something that she doesn't quite understand yet. "And let's move on to your next reaction. Do you remember what that was?"

I felt my bottom lip jut out as I remembered. "I cried."

"Okay. And why did you cry?" Lucy asked.

I let out a deep breath, trying to verbalize my feelings. "I was sad."

"Why?"

"He used to be my friend." I said quietly.

Lucy nodded. "And do you think that you were sad and crying because you were upset that you had lost the person you used to know as your friend?"