"I'm Not Crazy"

VIII.

"They love each other," I said decidedly, and my therapist just nodded because that wasn't really related to what she'd asked me. I didn't know what she'd even said to me anymore, but I knew it had been completely removed from the things I'd been telling her for the last several minutes. I thought about the way Basil had called Riley their Patroclus. I thought about Riley telling me he was embarrassingly in love. "I didn't know people loved like that in real life. I thought it was just in movies."

She wrote something down after I said that, and I pretended to look at a non existent bird out the window. I thought about the pigeon with the purple hue that I'd seen at school just a short week prior. I wondered if it was doing okay, better than me at the very least.

"How did you meet these people?" She asked. I felt her lean forward.

Instead of answering, I pondered why she would ask that. It could have been innocent curiosity, and a sane person probably would have stopped there, but I thought about the notes she was taking. I imagined meticulously crafted records of our conversations. I imagined her in a group phone call of some sort with my prescribers and caseworkers as they all discussed if I deserved the freedom I had. They were waiting for me to slip. They were sure it was coming.

This was the first time I'd left my house in days after all. It was Thursday. I hadn't left since my evening on the barstool that previous Monday.

"School," I lied.

I didn't really want to think about school. Thinking about it meant pondering the classes I'd skipped, the emails I'd ignored, and the papers I'd written in the emptiness of my bedroom on a lap top that buffered too much. They were decent papers. I comforted myself with the knowledge that I'd atleast done my homework. The absences were still unexcused. I was still unemployed. I'd showered for the first time in a while that morning, but my hair still felt stringy. I hadn't eaten more than scraps.

"And how's school going?" She asked me.

"It's great," I replied, the words falling out of me far too quickly. "I love it. It's everything I wanted it to be."

She nodded. I only saw it out the corner of my eye because I was staunchly refusing to look at her. I thought that if our eyes met, she'd be able to see it all. The blacks of my pupils signified a tunnel to the filing cabinet within. She'd read my mind and she'd know that I was like a piece of soap scum circling the open drain. I was seconds from being sucked down into the black oblivion of the urban waste system.

I know you're supposed to trust your therapist. That's the entire point of a therapist actually. It's supposed to be a trusting therapeutic relationship where you can divulge everything from your deepest hidden pits. I know that, because it's been told to me more times than I can count.

"You can trust me," they always said. "You're safe here. I'm here to listen and not judge."

Maybe that's the truth for some people. It's true for people that have never lied, whose words are taken as solid and faithful adaptations of their thoughts. It's true for people that haven't felt the iron shackles of being in the psychiatric system. That's just a different ball game entirely. It becomes a subjective truth.

You can trust them until they deem up unfit to be trusted.

I supposed I'd maybe earned those ideas they had about me though. Acting erratically wasn't exactly out of character for me. They had a right to worry. I'd given them the right. Upon meeting me my therapist had literally received a giant file with my mental health history labeled and organized for her convenience. She'd seen the inpatient stays. She'd seen the events listed, and the ways I'd acted out. She'd seen the manner in which I'd made myself into a weapon of torment.