Everything Will be Dark

Part One: Resurrection

'I'd like to start today by talking a little about your teenage years. Would you like to tell me a bit about them?'

Emily Hogan tightened her grip on the threadbare arm of the uncomfortable sofa. She had been pulling on a loose thread from the moment she had sat down and she couldn't help but wonder how many others had sat here, tugging on the fabric and balding the sofa in the process.

The therapist's office was a sparsely-furnished room, with a neutral wash of paint that bubbled here and there over cracked plaster. The stale odour of old cigarette smoke clung to every surface, as if the room's occupant had chain-smoked his life away before the smoking ban had come into place. Behind where Emily sat, three tall bookcases stretched from one side of the room to the other and it was crammed with neatly-labelled files and alphabetically-organised books. Emily felt the weighty judgement of a hundred bastions of modern psychological theory pressing down upon her back, no doubt all raising quizzical bushy eyebrows at her every word.

Her therapist didn't have bushy eyebrows, but he was the epitome of a walking cliché nevertheless, from the suede patches on the elbows of his tweed blazer to his closely-cropped college professor beard which he often stroked when deep in thought. Whenever he stopped to smooth down his moustache with thumb and forefinger, Emily knew that was the cue for him to broach a subject that he knew Emily was going to resist. She'd been here tugging on loose threads often enough to know the signs.

'We've been over this before,' Emily responded tersely, feeling the knots above her brow tightening.

The therapist smiled and rubbed his digits over his moustache again. 'If I recall rightly, we didn't get very far. I'd like to know a bit more. Gather a mental picture, if you like. Did you like school? Did you have any favourite subjects? What were your friends like? That kind of thing. No biggie.'

Emily hated when he tried to go all youth-speak on her. He was barely a few years older than her, for goodness sake, yet for some reason he seemed to think if he chucked in a few supposedly down-with-the-kids words, she'd relax and see him as a friend she could open up to, as opposed to the paid professional he actually was. His lame efforts were wasted though because Emily wouldn't have given a damn if he'd screamed YOLO at the top of his voice. She didn't want a friend. She wanted a miracle. She wanted a life-line. A chance to break through to the surface and breathe.

Glancing over his shoulder through the small window that offered her a view of the wide expanse of car park and the grey concrete jungle of the city beyond, Emily sucked in a breath and felt the beginnings of a headache creeping into the base of her skull. These sessions always meant the same thing. Migraines and pills. Codeine and convalescence. The convalescence thing suited her just fine. Inside her cottage, curled up on her bed, she felt safe. Outside made her increasingly tense, just as she was feeling now.

'I liked school. My favourite subjects were English and Home Economics but I hated Science and Mathematics. I had two close friends and got on with the rest okay. I wasn't Miss Popularity but I wasn't the kid everyone threw science experiments at either.' She chanted robotically, knowing full well that she wasn't telling him anything he wanted to hear. He didn't give a damn about what subjects were her favourites or particularly who her friends were. He wanted the grizzly stuff, the drama, the traumatic stories of extreme bullying or childhood abuse. He wanted to know if one of her teachers had ever groomed her for extra-curricular activities or whether she'd been bullied so bad she'd started cutting into her skin just to ease the pain. He wanted dirt and she had none, which was why she was here after all. She wanted answers more than he did, but so far, after ten sessions and a big hole in her bank balance, she was still no closer to the root cause of her depression.