After the events of No Way Home, Peter Parker had the chance to restart his life and start fresh. But without his family, friends, mentors or fellow Avengers, his life began to spiral into darkness.
His new neighbour however, seems to make that dark...
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Standing barefoot in the snow storm outside feels a lot more appealing to me right now given I'm sitting here in my psychiatrists office, watching him squint at his screen and gazing upon my patient notes. He did this every time I had a session with him, he'd read over my entire file for about five minutes in complete soul shattering silence just to remind himself how much of a basket case I was. Every. Single. Time.
I wasn't privy to seeing psychologists and speaking openly so these sessions weren't new to me; I had enough trauma to go on and on for eons. They became very much 'same-same' after each one though, which I guess was a good thing because appointments seemed more like casual check-ins rather than putting out urgent fires.
My first "psychiatrist" was my mothers pastor who tried to "purge the ungodly mistakes" out of my body by forcing me to pray to god. It was more like a conversion camp than an open therapy session. If my mother wasn't slapping the sin out of me, Pastor McKinley was waterboarding the sin out of me. Similarly to a baptism where you are dunked relatively quickly in shallow holy water, I was held deep underwater for extended periods of time with no control of when I could come up for air.
When I'd finally be allowed to gasp for air, my tears would simply melt in with the rest of the water cascading down my face. With my hair in my eyes and water in my lungs, my mother would barely bat an eye to the harsh coughing and spluttering. I still remember her staring back at me with an empty gaze and telling our pastor to do it again.
And again.
My current psychiatrist however, was a lot better. Not only was he qualified in human psychology, he had taken me onboard as a patient pretty much the day after I graduated from high school and moved to MIT. He treated people all along the East Coast, flying into various cities and states to see his select few patients each time. Luckily for me, I was able to start as one of his Boston patients and then transition to be in his New York database.
We spoke briefly about my work, like how I was struggling to find a journalism job that I liked. He suggested I become an intern at a gossip magazine to gain 'tangible experience' - so I suggested I shove a pencil into my neck instead. I didn't dislike my bar job by any means, he just thought it was a dangerous environment for me to be in. He was kind of right too.
"Let's dig into the fun stuff, shall we? How is your budding relationship with the neighbour downstairs?" He asked with a devilish grin, knowing that delving into his patients love lives was the more 'exciting' part to him in his profession.
"It's good," I shrugged, smiling to hide the fact I didn't really know what else to say because it was still so new and unfamiliar territory for me.
Dr. Shao was a cheeky man. He was ridiculously tall and skinny, nearing six foot six yet probably weighing less than me. He had thick tinned glasses and wore cuff links with 8 balls on them. When I questioned him about his heavy cocaine use, he simply looked at me with a quizzical look until I motioned towards his wrists.
