I love/kill you

2

"Your mind seems to wander today." Dr. Nin said to me.

"Oh, I'm sorry." His voice brought me back to my senses. I hurriedly stopped gazing through the window and apologized to him. Well, my mind did wander, but not to random things. It wandered to a person. To make it clear, I couldn't get Phu out of my head. The man who met Dr. Nin before me occupied my mind, and I couldn't focus on the session at all.

First, let me explain about the place. Dr. Nin's clinic has an entrance and an exit separated from one another. The patients visiting the doctors use the entrance on one side and stay in the waiting room. Once they are done with their appointments, they leave through the exit on the other. I can't say for sure if this would apply to other clinics. Here, those who come and leave are separated so they don't mingle. As I told you, the exit door was under repair for malfunction. So Phu had to leave the hall through the entrance and walk past me, who was on the way to see Dr. Nin in his room.

For the second time our eyes locked, both of us were prepared. I looked at him, and he looked back. Since each of us knew we should not interrupt the hall's flow, greet, and start a conversation to get to know one another, all we could do was only exchange glances. And when I walked in, and he walked out, at the very split second we were walking past each other that I headed inside and he outside—our pinkies came into contact. I didn't even know whether it was intentional. Believe me, people are unaware of their actions sometimes. But if it was, the intention was mutual. Despite being a gentle touch, we sensed the spark as though the impulses flew through the small contact surfaces, back and forth from him to me, and vice versa. In that split second, parts of me went away with him, and the same happened on the other end. I could still sense his touch on my skin throughout the rest of the day. Dr. Nin must have noticed me looking down at my pinkie so often. That must be why he brought up my absent-mindedness.

"I'm so sorry, Dr. Nin."

"That's OK." He then cracked up. "I'm used to it,  you're not the first one. Patients don't pay attention to me sometimes. I'm going to call it a day, anyway."

Dr. Nin then looked at the clock before putting down his pen, and chuckled. "Your mom will receive the bill at the same amount, though."

His joke eased me up a bit and relieved me of the guilt that I made my doctor, who was also my idol, feel neglected.

"Can you share what's in your mind?" He asked.

The treatment time ended, I guess. He seemed to ask in a brother-to-brother kind of way. Wait, can I talk about it? I wondered. Well, it's true that I have a close friend, but I'm not that close to him to have such a talk. He always talks behind my back, and I don't appreciate that. Rambling things out to friends on Twitter sounds good, but they are so distant that I don't feel comfortable sharing anything trivial with them.

"Have you ever..."

I felt a pang of hesitation before I finished the sentence since I was unsure if our relationship was intimate enough to do the bro talk. Whatever, I paid the fees for my treatment, didn't I? Just think of it as a freebie.

"Have you ever had love at first sight?"

So I asked. Though that sounded like a question to him, it served as the starter leading to the conversation outside my therapy—the brother-to-brother talk or the like. I believed  Dr. Nin would want to have a talk if he suspected that his own brother, in case he had one, had love at first sight. Before the treatment, I had vacillated between certainty and hesitation. But when our pinkies had touched one another, the sensation equivalent to a shock flowed through the surfaces and still lingered in my pinkies, even at the moment, and the shock which still stimulated parts of my brain reaffirmed to me. It was love at first sight. Yes, Phu was my love at first sight and nothing else. That was my first time experiencing anything like that in my life. Funny, isn't it? People always dream about having it in various ways. Some even think of it as something they will never find, but I experienced it out of the blue, and to top it off, in a psychiatric clinic. Whoever learns about my story will find it peculiarly funny rather than romantic. Well, you don't have any influence over when love takes place, and nobody has control over whether it would happen to begin with.