I WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FUNNY | ✓

▬ 43: the truth is that I'm the coward, always was

                There's a piece of gum dried between the leg of my chair and the metal that outlines the seat. It started raining before I left Dal's and it has since evolved into a downpour that pellets against the sheet metal windowsills of the Johnstone building. Cars slosh through the puddles. My legs bounce with the urge to stand up and watch them instead of the woman opposite me.

Effie wrings her fingers in her lap as she shares. Has she been coming here for the last two years or has she too regressed and now returns, a prodigal son? I guess I'd know if I listened but my mind is fixated on the storm and the effort required to refocus it is daunting. Is it the meds or am I just lazy?

Her cuticles are still crimson from her incessant picking of them. So she can't be that much better.

I'll never understand how talking to a bunch of suicidal teenagers is supposed to help when all they do is reveal to me all the reasons why life is miserable that I myself hadn't thought of.

Like two years ago, there was this bloke, Lucas, who would go on spirals about how he'd accomplish his ideal life only for it to all be upended by climate change or a new world war so why bother trying? I never saw it like that but sure he had a point.

My teeth find another fringe of dry skin to exfoliate from my lower lip. Forget the end of the world, where am I going to get 2,373 pounds and twenty p?

I'm never going to find work in this town. If people don't think I've been to a youth institute, they think I'm insane, which I can't blame them too much for after my short episode of psychosis in 2006 that convinced me, among other things, that in place of a collectable toy, one of the Cheerios packets in Tesco trapped a live robin hatchling and began promptly to empty all of them on the floor.

Am I supposed to find a job somewhere else and commute? I don't have a driver's licence, much less a car.

My name reaches me like an echo in a cave and I wrestle my attention to the group. Miss Farris, a thirty-something who thinks she can still relate to teenagers — simultaneously endearing and embarrassing — smiles at me despite my clear absence of intent to reciprocate it.

'Would you like to share?' Like? Has anyone ever? 'You didn't say anything last time.'

In case it wasn't clear, I don't want to be here.

I don't say that. Tracing one of my cornrows, my eyes are out of focus by the time I do speak. 'I've got new meds– more... meds. So I sit around all day, being even more of a burden than I already was before. It's bare brilliant.'

'Why do you say that you're a burden?' Miss Farris hasn't perfected her psychiatrist voice yet, nor her psychiatrist face. Sadness seeps in, the kind of sadness that comes with blame — "you're making me sad and you ought to feel sorry for it"

'Because I am.' I drop my hand back to my lap. 'I keep ruinin everythin for everyone all the time. My parents have better things to do than chaperone me, and–'

I cut myself off. What do I even say about the rest of it? They all live in constant fear of me. And what have I done to Sonia? Or Miles?

'Your guilt is natural, Ziri, but you have to remember that you're not in control of your illness. Just like cancer, it's not your fault.'

'I hate it when people say that.'

'Pardon?' She asks because she genuinely didn't hear but it sparks embers in my chest and I can't stifle the fire.

So I allow it to consume me. '"It's just like cancer". I fucking hate it when people say that. "It's an illness just like cancer but in your mind". Except it's nowhere near cause people get cancer and either get cured or they die. Those aren't options for me. I have to live with this forever.