I WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FUNNY | ✓

▬ 14

'YOU CONFUSE ME', OR CONVENTIONALLY: I'M IN LOVE WITH YOU

            It takes everything in me not to pick at the bite mark when I sit on Dr Colas's red sofa on Wednesday. It's healed enough to no longer require gauze, nor is there any necessity for me to hide it here, but the scabs on the deepest tooth marks are horridly alluring.

I settle for spinning around the hyena canine on my necklace instead and refuse to meet her stare.

'Have you been self-harming again?' she asks from her embroidered armchair. Like Dal, Dr Colas has mastered a voice of utter neutrality that manages to retain warmth. When I do nothing but root deeper into the sofa, she continues. 'It's nothing for you to be ashamed of, Ziri.'

Of course, it is. I'm supposed to know safer alternatives, and, by now, I'm supposed to not need them in the first place.

I shake my head.

'Have your symptoms gotten worse, to your notice?' It's the same question, only more shrouded.

'No.' I scratch the side of my neck as I speak. 'I got blindsided by a trigger once and the other grounding techniques you taught me weren't workin. My mum's overreactin, per usual.'

Miles would probably never speak to me again if he knew where I am. Do I care? It's almost painful to attempt to figure out what to think. I've had to rewrite so many aspects of him in a handful of days that it's dizzying.

Do I care? Does your opinion matter? Should it?

On one hand, I can't deny that him being gay changes things, or at the very least, I can't help the empathy that forces me to care about him, if for nothing else, as a fellow queer teen. On the other, I'm not going to pretend like being some neutral bystander is okay, even if he does have personal stakes.

But Miles has never done anything, thinks one voice.

Yeah, exactly, thinks another. He never does anything. He turns a blind eye to everything and how is anyone supposed to excuse that? What, he plays the dead dad card I forgive and forget?

I want to. That's the worst part. I want to forgive and forget even if I'll continue to condemn the same in others. You make ad hominem so tempting.

Does any of it matter? Now that tutoring is over and graduation is around the corner, are we ever going to speak again? Do I care if we don't?

'You seem distracted.' This is Dr Colas's quintessential psychiatrist move — what seems like a casual statement but is actually a question. Only half of my mind listens to her as the other remains tangling itself around Miles. A part of me is always going to be tangled in you.

My eyes don't focus when I respond. 'I'm thinkin about how, surprisingly, me and the royal family actually have a lot in common because we both leech off the layman's taxes. Sure, I use it for basic healthcare and education and they use it to furnish their palaces, but still.'

'I thought we agreed you'd work on your urge to turn everything into a joke to distract others and change the subject.'

'No. You said I should. I didn't say I was gonna.'

She's unamused.

Dr Colas is the only Black NHS psychiatrist in Sufadale and I never forget to thank God for her presence after a session — I can tell her things without needing to explain them or skirt around her feelings. She lets me speak French when it comes more naturally and even Darija though she doesn't understand and, like a paleotempestologist, I have to dig around for overwash deposits to translate into English once the storm settles. She isn't even a therapist — I'm fully aware she goes well out of her job description to counsel me because I'm difficult and selfish and refuse everyone else who actually signed up for this.