Sincerely, Mike

11: An Honest Goodbye

The succeeding three days were quick to pass without warrant, bringing with them a substantial amount of borderline gratuitous shakeup and emotional fluctuation.

Upon his return home after his...eventful day three days prior at a time much later than expected and his obvious shirking of his psycho-medical responsibilities, Mike's wife had been, for lack of more explicit terms, completely and utterly incensed.

Barely having given him a chance to even walk through the door, she was quick to lecture him, regurgitating her same, familiar spiel about how he never wanted to accept the help he was given and was, in his adamant refusal, only contributing to the worsening of his condition for what felt to Mike to be the hundredth time that week alone.

Already sorrowful and ashamed of himself for having lied to her for an extended period of time about having gone to visit the psychiatrist, he hadn't take to her warm welcome home all too well, the biting truth behind it inciting a guilt and self-hatred fueled crying fit that landed him not only condemnation to sleeping on the couch for the night but an until-further-notice house arrest as well.

Still angry with what she believed to be her husband's stubborn refusal to accept the help being given and obviously deeply concerned, Brittney had decided that if Mike was not going to go to the doctor, the doctor was going to go to him.

And, upon Britt's request, she had done just that.

As part of his "house arrest", Mike was forced to spend an hour and a half of every day in the basement with the psychiatrist- much against his will- and disclose his emotional state of affairs to the complete and total stranger he more often than not doubted the competency of.

Needless to say, he hated the woman and her therapy sessions.

He failed to see how answering all of her irrelevant questions would help, or how any kind of emotional advancement would come out of disclosing highly personal details and shattering like glass in front of a complete and total stranger on a daily basis.

He couldn't quite understand why the shrink seemed to think that her dry, surly, passive-aggressive nature would help pull any details out of him or encourage him to open up a bit more.

And he certainly was not about to begin taking and risk developing an addiction to the slough of anxiety and anti-depressant medications the doctor had prescribed him.

After all, hadn't prescription psychotherapeutic drugs been partially to blame for the collective downward spiral they had all taken in the past few months?

The proposition almost seemed insulting to Mike.

Still, pointless and inefficacious as it all was, he bit his tongue and remained silent, obediently going along with the redundant ridiculousness of it all for the sake of his marriage.

As the few days of these redundant practices continued to stretch on, they grew increasingly challenging to endure, each encounter becoming more painful than the last, the time between the present moment and the inevitable end-all phone-call growing increasingly difficult to bide.

And it didn't particularly help that at this point, his wife was just about everything except understanding of his condition. Granted, she had her fair share of patience with him, and he made certain to recognize that, but after dealing with the depressed shell of her husband that now floated lifelessly and aimlessly around the house like an earthbound spirit- in conjunction his refusal to accept the help she tried so hard to offer him and her own emotional baggage-for far too long, she had lost any and all patience that remained and was now trying much more forcefully to improve his deteriorated mental state.