The Reclamation

14

"So I know last week we went over some heavy stuff. I'm really glad you were able to benefit from our exercise, but I want you to know you can talk to me about anything. I'm not just here to fix the big things, I also want to hear the small things, like if the cafeteria served salad instead of applesauce today. Whatever you want to talk about." Anna speaks softly from the armchair across from me. I've been coming to therapy for three weeks now, and I'm not a fan. I hate talking about my emotions, especially with a paid professional who's job it is to dissect every word I offer them.

This is only my third time speaking with Anna. She's super sweet, but don't know how this is going to help me get better. In therapy you're supposed to sit down and spill your deepest darkest secrets to a complete stranger, then they'll blame your problems on your mother, you pay them out the ass, and you can both go home just to do it all again next week. That's great and all, and if it works for people, I'm glad. I'm just not sure how any of this is going to help me use the girls bathroom at school again.

Last session I broke down in front of Anna. I actually had a full on meltdown. It was mortifying. I thought that my mom might let me be done with therapy after that. After all, I told her my deepest darkest secret: I'm having a hard time moving on. But no. Now my mom is insisting that I keep going to therapy. I told my therapist what she wanted to hear, but I still have to come. I'm going to school almost every day again, but here I am. There's no point in this, no getting around it. There's no one thing I can say to end these sessions or to convince Anna that I don't need to be here, sitting across from her in these aggravatingly-boring tan armchairs for the foreseeable future.

"So, what have you been up to this last week?" Anna asks.

I inhale, trying my best to conjure up a quick, light answer. "Not much. I went to school. Hung out with a friend. Spent some time with Millie. Grabbed dinner with my friend's family last night. It's been pretty slow."

"Which friend? Is this Nick?" I shift around in my chair at the mention of his name.

"No. Her name is Mia."

"Oh. You haven't mentioned her before. Is she a friend from school?"

"I guess you could say that." I can't help the sour smirk that creeps onto my face. I hadn't planned on mentioning Mia to Anna. I'm here to fix things. Mia isn't something in my life that needs to be fixed. In fact, she's the one doing the fixing.

"Well that sounded cryptic," Anna chuckles.

I give a light smile back. "Yeah, we, uh... we were in the stall together. During... you know."

"Oh. So you two weren't friends before that day?"

"No. We didn't talk. We've been going to school together for a long time, but we never really knew each other."

"Wow. So you had dinner with her parents last night? How was that?"

I swing my legs over the arm of the chair so I can use the opposite arm as a backrest, then fold my hands over my stomach and stare at the ceiling, playing out the wildly overplayed visit-to-the-shrink trope. "It was fine," I lie. The dinner was a disaster. Daniel drank his supposedly-sober heart out, Steve chipped away at my soul with his eyes for the entirety of the dinner, and Mia was an emotional wreck. I was so stressed that if you stuck a lump of coal up my ass, I'd shit out a diamond- which Steve would promptly accuse me of stealing from him.

"That's good. Was this your first time meeting her parents? Did you like them?"

"Yeah. We hang out a lot, but I've never met her parents until now. They were... sweet," I practically choke out.

"Is that because you were both out of the house a lot?" Is she accusing Mia of being the reason I was absent from my family?

"No. We were just at her house," I say bluntly.