Wishing You Were a Ghost

You will. You? will. You? Will. You? Will.

Frank's therapist is a quack. He loves her anyway.

Her office is a soft cobalt blue because blue is calming, and tranquil. It smells like lavender because lavender is said to help with anxiety. There are crystals on a table that are all apparently full of healing vibrations, and Frank thinks it's all a crock of absolute horseshit.

But he bought some amethyst and lepidolite to scatter around his new apartment anyway. A big thing called a tower that he keeps by his bed, and a polished cabo- some French word that he can't pronounce - that he's taken to using as a worry stone at times. That one lives on his coffee table with a coaster-type thing that's made out of rose quartz because supposedly that's supposed to help with 'self-love', and Frank is sorely lacking in that area these days.

He's not sure he's ever hated himself more, actually.

"How'd the move go?" Emily asks, getting herself comfortable in her chair with her usual mug of tea.

"It went," Frank says, picking up one of the many fidget toys on the table. This one is an infinity cube, and it's his favorite. He sets about folding and unfolding it in its neverending little loop. "He came to get the couch."

"He being...?"

Frank rolls his eyes but doesn't take them off of the toy in his hands. "Gerard," he says curtly. He hates saying his name out loud. He hates hearing it. He hates the way it makes him feel. He hates feeling. "He came over to get the couch and the chair. And his bookshelf."

"Anything else?" Emily prompts. She taps the tip of her pen lightly against her notepad.

This time Frank glares. He hates when she starts scribbling. Even if he knows by now that it's really just her taking notes so that she doesn't forget things between sessions. Or so that she can double back around on topics if he's just barreling through a monologue but says something that she thinks is important.

"No," Frank mumbles after a moment, halting his hands and staring at the marbled design of the cube like it's the most interesting thing he's ever seen. "He didn't want the dresser or his bedside table, and I don't blame him, because I don't want them either. I don't want the bed, and I don't want the TV stand, or the coffee table, or the dining set-"

"Because you associate them with him?"

"I associate them with a fucking seven hour IKEA trip where we crawled through a kids' tunnel bunkbed and nearly fell asleep on a couch." He doesn't mean to snap, and he finally looks up to see Emily gazing at him.

It's the same level sort of stare she always has. Calm, patient, understanding, open.

She irritates the fucking shit out of him, but she's good at what she does, and she disarms his temper 98% of the time. With the exception of the one incident when he left the office in a rage and didn't come back to see her for three weeks because he was angry that she touched on the fact that maybe some of his issues lie in his parents' divorce when he was eight.

"And I had to see him again, so that was... Not great," Frank adds in a slightly deflated tone. He can be angry about the furniture that he's sick of seeing, but he can't be angry about seeing Gerard. That had felt like he was a balloon with all of its air being let out. Whatever walls he'd built up in their months apart had all come tumbling down the second that man stepped out of the borrowed truck.

"He dyed his hair."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"It doesn't feel right," Frank says defensively. "It looks- it looks wrong."

Emily writes something in her notepad and Frank busies himself with his infinity cube so that he doesn't glare at her some more.

"What about it is wrong?" she asks once she's done.