Tailored Hats, Cats and White Rabbits Original

7// "If It Was So It Might Be"

7// “If It Was So It Might Be”

I sat opposite my private therapist, my hands curled to my sides in fists, figuring out new ways to conceal the anger and pain that threatened to erupt from me every second I was cooped up in here with this nut job who thought that she knew how I was feeling. Lies…all lies. This morning she was wearing a grey business suit with clicky black heels, her small puckered lips were coated red in an attempt to cover the fact that they were hideous and sneered whenever I gave her an answer that she didn’t approve of…which was always.

“So Michael, how are you going?” she chirped out. How am I going…? Despite the gut-wrenching feeling of never being adequate enough, never adequate enough to live, a waste of breath, space and flesh. The fact that the only thing I can think when I see something shiny and sharp is how I can drive it into my body to make me bleed to death because that is the only way to get out of this spiral of dark hell. The knowing feeling that I may never get out of here, that I may never see my mother again, God knows how she’s going after a whole month on her own. The back of my eyes burnt with angry tears. The fact that Alisa Wilders keeps me up every night, her whimsy, her beauty, her goddamn porcelain face haunting me in my dreams. The fact that I could only touch her the way I wanted in my dreams, and even then I didn’t feel anything.

Other than that…fucking peachy.

The small stubs of my nails dug harshly into my palms, please bleed, make me feel something other than this, I begged. I shut my eyes closed and summoned the girl’s face to my mind, her smile, her grin, her lips, her pearl white skin.

 Always…always the same fucking question.

“How do you think?” I snarled, not bothering to make eye contact with the bitch. I heard her shuffle around on her swivel chair, obviously uncomfortable and irritated by my constant response to her questions with questions of my own. Good…I hope she got the message. She was smart enough to figure out that I was not ‘going’ at all. I was staying and I’ll always stay. I wrenched my eyes open only to have my vision fuzzy with tears.

I watched as she gave me that condescending smile of hers before she answered, “Well have you found anything that makes you happy like Hillary told you to work on this week”
I narrowed my eyes in disbelief and shook my head,
“Is that really what you want to ask a depressed teenager?” my teeth grinding against each other, threatening to tear to shreds underneath my rage, “What makes me happy” the very word, dripped like poison off my tongue, the word was not thrown around so easily in this place. You had to be careful not to be stupid with how you phrased it, especially infront of me. It was pure profanity when I used it. I could even feel the depression laughing…cackling at me.

“It’s been a week, Michael, there must be something that you like”
“Oh right because a whole fucking week is all the time it takes to ‘fix’ things” I put quotations around the fix. The sides of her mouth pinched, in clear disappointment. Yeah, you thought I was progressing, surprise lady, I’m not!
“Okay, well let’s start at the beginning” she sat higher in her chair as I slouched further down the couch, unfurling my fists to find that the skin was a pockmarked riddle of red and white spots.
“What makes you unhappy or sad?”
The laugh that resonated from my mouth lacked humour and felt that ice shards,
“How much time do you have?” her jaw clenched slightly, not noticeably, but just enough for me to realise that she hated that I never actually answered the questions.
“Well just name a few and we’ll work from there” she gave me a sad smile, one of pity.

I took a sharp intake of breath, did I really want to tell her everything that made me unhappy? Everything…
“This place, the paper thin gown we have to wear, the watered down orange juice in the cafeteria, I hate that because I love orange juice, not being able to watch cable TV” I rolled off, looking past her eyes and over her shoulder at a serene picture of a white sand beach with green palms trees and a blue sea. It looked photo-shopped because of how bright and sharp the colours were.
“How controlled this place is. No freedom to do what we want because we’re not on level three and below. Being woken up whenever Jaxon and James have night terrors. Blondie thinks I’m innocent, the way everyone looks at me and my arms, poppy flowers, how leather makes me sweat when I sit on it, stereotypes, smell of burnt popcorn”