And after all this, what’s left?
1) I am sitting in a room. It is monochromatic and dull. Varying shades of beige and white, interrupted only by the slightest bursts of colour, which seem to me like small acts of defiance in a room so toneless and cold.
2) There is a woman in this room. The odd thing about this woman is that she appears neither particularly young nor old; rather, weathered by something other than age. In her hand is a therapist’s grocery list of futile observations. Name. Age. Weight. Birthday. How I’m doing today. My feelings. Thoughts. Happy things. Sad things. Angry things. Hobbies. Interests. Reasons. I have told her so much and still, she looks at me like I am a stranger. I am the thousandth person to step into this room a stranger and bleed, and then emerge this room, shaken and bare, still a stranger whose sob story does not incite this woman’s sympathies. I convince myself that this is not what I want, and stare at my shoes instead of into her eyes.
People, I decide, know nothing about people.
3) I tell her that I am scared. Of life, of death, of myself, of people, of my friends, of my family, of cockroaches and sharp things and food and bridges and medicine and bathtubs and hairdryers. I am scared of afterlife and my grades and the mall and of meeting my favourite celebrity and not knowing how to approach them. I am scared of concerts and affection and touch and when people talk too loud and then they’re talking over you and you can’t speak, you can’t speak, no one will hear you, no one cares to hear you, you are silent, you are small. I am scared of never being a person’s favourite person. Of never being a first choice. Of never being the most valued, the most loved.
The woman stares at a wall and asks as to why that is, and they are a child’s words, coming straight out of her compliant, adult mouth.
4) Grocery list #4, el último: my desires. I ask her what this has to do with my fears, and she discards me almost immediately. Eventually what I say is this: I want to have a conversation with a person who has something good to say. I don’t care if it’s anything from gay rights to baking; I just want to listen and learn and argue about something that matters. I don’t care about the weather, I tell her. I don’t care about your day, but I do care about how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking about. I care about anything real. I care about real. I miss real. I am an extraordinarily unreal person surrounded by other extraordinarily unreal people, and I want to meet someone who will teach me how to be amazingly real.
She stays quiet for a while, and the silence that ensues is almost as stale as the rest of the room. Finally, she slowly gets up from her chair, walks up to me and, very awkwardly and very slowly, she hugs me. I consider prying her fingers from my shirt and telling her to calm down because she’s shaking really hard and it’s not like it’s very Grumpy Therapist-like of her to display affection, because it’s not. I wonder if she heard what I told her about being afraid of touch. I don’t think she did.
People, I decide, see fragments of themselves in other people. I wonder what the woman saw in me that day. I hope that whatever it was, it was capital R-real.
