*TW: Suicide, self-harm.*
The walls were too thin at that office. I had complained about it to Dr. Z but she said she couldn’t prevent the patients from expressing themselves. She calmed me by saying that there was no way I was overheard during our sessions. That our conversations were held at a much more tame tone than the patient who came in before me. If that patient, let’s call her “Sophia”, were to enunciate just a little better, I would have known some of the most important details of her private psychological life. From the two sessions that I had half-overheard, I found out that she was disappointed about something. She would go from talking in this static monotone voice to growing into a blazing symphony of angst. I clearly overheard Sophia calling herself someone's “daddy." That she hated feeling like a daddy. She said she felt like a ghost, too. And lastly, something was said about Alexiythmia and how it was getting better or maybe worse. I don't really know, it wasn't all that clear. She would drag her feet out of the psychologist’s office and into the lobby and kind of wave me in as if to say, "your time to go in there, loser." She looked like a cornered animal. I felt as if she would die soon.
The next time I visited the office, I figured I should wear headphones so as to not purposefully eavesdrop on Sophia’s therapy session. Usually, I’m incredibly nosey and would revel in these sorts of situations. In this case, however, I had this feverish feeling that I should steer clear. A few minutes went by and she finally came out of the office. Something about not hearing her shift through all her tones of worry made me feel better. The feeling faded. Sophia came out of the office and looked past me. Her eyes glistened. All-encompassing black pupils. She got her phone out and proceeded to surf it slowly with her finger. I continued to gather my stuff to go and replace her spot in the office. Something told me that she was about to make one of the worst calls of her life. Turns out it wasn’t a call, it was a FaceTime. I heard the little boops that sound like they’re underwater. She shuffled into the elevator and let out a little "hello" before disappearing behind stainless steel doors. Once I got into the office and started divulging my own shit I quickly forgot about Sophia. I was selfish and eager to talk about myself (as we usually are) but life had warned me that I had been around something macabre, something wicked, something heavy.
Two days went by. I was enjoying a burrito bowl on the college campuses’ quad when I heard a sexy voice say, “hey, you’re the guy at Dr. Z’s office who comes in after me.” I turned around and there she was sipping a beer and holding a vape pen. She had one of those THC carts that were clearly not from a California or Colorado dispensary but still got people high. There was some story about some backyard chemists in Iowa who killed or almost killed a bunch of young country kids going around at that time. Anyways, she looked better than I remember but she was clearly on some sort of hedonistic streak. I mean, the beer, come on. That also deserves commenting as some sort of sign of pleasure-seeking or oppositional signaling. I just smiled and nodded my head a little because I thought the exchange would end there. She started approaching me and I felt my stomach drop. I was about to shit myself. I remembered how I felt hearing and seeing her at Dr. Z's office. She just came right up to me all casual. Sat across from me on these metal tables with little square holes in the seats.
I tried pushing my little fingers through the holes as I anxiously waited for her to say something else. I felt like they were going through a meat grinder. She just looked at me from behind a puff cloud of marijuana smoke and said, “hi.” I said, “hey, what’s up, how are you?” Not even letting her answer I asked, “can we do this? Like, talk outside of Dr. Z’s office?” She was half-stunned by how idiotic of a question it was, but was able to gather herself and say, “uh, yeah, it’s fine. Plus, you must hear about all the shit that happens in my life. Those walls are thin.”
I hated that. There was a moment of silence where I thought she might drop her beer with how loosely she held it. She was calm but I felt this acute presence of chaos. I didn’t know what to respond so I said, “oh, no, you’re good. It’s probably not all that interesting, either.” So dumb but I said it with enough comedic emphasis that she coughed up a chuckle. “You calling me boring?” Exhale. I felt a little better by how she said it. She said it like she knew she was attractive, although I could barely look at her face directly. Her sense of style somehow reaffirmed the belief that she was attractive, albeit, unconventionally. She was wearing these weird all-white Japanese shoes, purple leggings with Jonah Hill and Randy Couture's faces on them, and a baggy white t-shirt with a wife-beater underneath. For a second I thought about us fucking. Interestingly enough, I ended up replying, “oh, no, trust me, something tells me you’ve got plenty to talk about.” I said it in an ironic, almost cold tone that reminded her that I too was one of Dr. Z’s patients. I wanted to establish myself in this conversation as someone not to be messed with. You know, it's the whole fable about the frog and the scorpion. I wanted to make sure everything was out in the open.
She pulled out a peach Snapple from her backpack and shook her head at my comment. “Ahhh, you’re just coming to grips with it. Finally realizing that the people that pushed you into that office were right about something within you. Maybe not completely right, but right enough that you see it now. You see it and it’s what makes you drive there and push yourself into that couch.” I didn’t know what to say. I mean she was right but who talks like that? You never put it into those terms for yourself, so it caught me off guard. But still, as I said earlier, I was half expecting it. She noticed and said, “did I freak you out?” She laughed a little but the way she said it comforted me a bit more. It was like her way of telling me that she does that to people often. I naively responded, “what do you think it was about you that made them recommend you for 1 on 1 therapy with an actual psychologist?” I immediately regretted asking. I asked to feign and reassure emotional closeness. I wasn't feeling all that well during those times. She could feel that.
She understood the context of the question. She said that it was - most likely - her having said that she didn’t feel like she existed in her own body anymore - especially around other humans. She felt like this sack of flesh and bones that would react and act from an emotional place that was not her own. She explained that her tone and perhaps the experiences she recollected for the student therapist might have made the young therapist think that she had lost her sense of identity. That she was someone at risk to do insensitive acts of injustice to others due to extreme existential detachment. She also added that she confessed feeling like an explorer or character in other people’s lives. I told her that I could see how that would unnerve the student psychologist who first analyzes you to see if you need 1 on 1 therapy. That I can imagine how that sort of thought process could develop into something potentially dangerous for society.
She puffed on her vape pen and looked me up and down. I thought she would ask me about what I said, but she didn’t. “I’m doing better now in terms of grounding myself in the present.” She took a pause. “I don’t really deal with any of the things that first brought me to Dr. Z. Sometimes I wonder why I still go. I hope it’s not one of those things where the institution itself has just convinced me I need it." She took another puff. "I think I would feel a little silly if I stopped going at this point. I mean, it helps, I have the money, it's something really good.” I nodded my head in understanding. I got that. “I’m dealing with different stuff now.” “What do you mean by that?”, I asked. We shared this moment where I confessed with my eyes that I had felt the pain in her voice through those thin walls. My soul had trembled to the rhythm of her cries while waiting out in that lobby. “You’ll come to find out...maybe. You’ll come to find out that sometimes piecing yourself back together means building up the new monsters in your life.” She interrupted the feelings of anxiety building back up inside of me by asking, “Do you know 'Alisha Stargaze'?” I didn’t.
She asked if I liked to go to different gyms. What my major was. If I liked certain types of entertainment. What high school I went to. She asked them in this quickfire manner that woke me up. I responded to the questions quickly. It made me feel like I was being vetted for something important. Maybe to keep my life. I felt the anxiety spillover. I wanted to get up. She finished her line of questioning, lowered her gaze, and said, “I don’t trust you, but you should know that the worst thing you could do for yourself is to reflect the many seminal truths within other people.” She finished the rest of her beer but never lost eye contact with me. “They’ll hate you for it. They’ll hate that you don’t buy into their platitudes. You know the ones. ‘Everyone's a little hypocritical', or ‘not everything is so black and white’, or ‘we’re all just human’. They want you to accept their flaws and skip over everything else. They might accept your love but they don’t want it to be attached to any sort of sentiments of self-actualization.” I could feel that she was inching towards talking about some of her and Dr. Z’s topics of discussion.
Suddenly, she got up and said that she needed to go. I could tell that she was ready to flee. Like she had to go do something which she had been putting off since birth. I felt light-headed by how quickly the conversation had developed. I think both of us would've admitted at that very second how odd we felt. I especially had been drawn to her personality strongly. I felt intense feelings of dread while being around her. For this conversation to have happened the way it did left me emotionally wobbled. Perhaps both of us being patients of Dr. Z did draw it out of us in some way, who knows. I'm still piecing it all together now. I thought I’d see her the next time I was at Dr. Z's office but nope. I asked Dr. Z about it the second time I went without seeing Sophia. I asked, “where's that girl that comes in before me been?” Dr. Z looked rattled. She asked if I knew her, I told her no that we had only talked once about five or six days ago. She told me that I should talk to campus police. That it was best to get any type of information on Sophia recollected. Dr. Z made a call and 25 minutes later a detective from the metro department was in our little office. Dr. Z left us alone while I told him about my little meeting with Sophia. I asked him if she was in danger. He told me that they had found her dead in the woods with a self-inflicted shotgun wound through the mouth. They found her about 4 days ago but she had carried through with the act the same day she and I had talked. I did the math and realized nobody knew she was gone for almost two to three days.
He went on to talk about how Sophia’s friend Alisha Stargazing had been unsuccessfully gaslighting Sophia. Sophia knew that Alisha and her stepmother were having an affair. Sophia felt responsible and - to make matters worse - was beginning to like her own mother again. She seemed to love life and appeared untroubled. She was a drop shipper from Wyoming who inherited a lot of money and thought she could make great films. The detective said that Sophia had left meticulous notes about all of it in her journal. According to the detective, Sophia got to see a pretty close look at what was going on before she decided to take her own life. She made comments about feeling sick seeing both Alisha and her stepmother try to adopt new branches of philosophy or spirituality or art. Both searching for tenets or axioms that resonated with their actions. She joked but was genuinely worried that - soon enough - they would discover moral nihilism and just decide to kill her or smear her already non-existent reputation. Sophia's jokes started becoming "realizations" that perhaps it was best if she just “left.” That maybe with her gone they and the rest of the world would realize that the spell was lifted. That they could be free and open and live lives that weren’t weighed down by the memories of Sophia. She saw herself as this sort of seed that had delivered all of these circumstances. She felt "tainted." She said that the comedic tragedy could end now - so she ended it
I asked the detective if she was angry at them and if that's why she did it. He said the opposite. That she described them in almost childlike terms. She lent understanding towards their actions by writing that, “they just don’t know any better.” She never felt surprise or indignation. She felt that their behaviors were representative of something greater. Something that had weighed down all of humanity. Still, that didn’t alleviate her mixture of boredom and pain for it all. She felt as if there was no longer room for her in this world of instinct. The detective said that she was able to withstand the pain they tried hurling at her, but that she couldn’t withstand the pain they were creating for themselves, the new people in their lives, and those that haven't been born. He said it as if he was proud of her - or maybe I'm just projecting. The detective ended his synopsis of Sophia's journal and asked me with over-worked eyes if I knew anybody outside of her mother that he could talk to. That Dr. Z calling and pointing to me as a friend was the closest he had gotten to talking with anyone that he thought might help. I asked if he talked to Alisha or the stepmother, he said that this case wasn't getting worked like that. I still don't understand what that means. He asked if that was all I had on her. That was all I had so he gathered his papers. He left me alone.
I was awestruck. I felt supernaturally clairvoyant. I mean, I knew that she was going to die. I knew that she had a dark aura that reeked of impending doom. I was so confused and I still am today writing about it. I remember discussing the matter more briefly with Dr. Z. I reminded her how hard it was for me to hear these types of stories. She knew what I was talking about. It’s what brought me into the office to begin with. Dr. Z looked at me with sincere, sparkling eyes and said, “Sophia was a unique girl who was born into a hard world. She was born with a hard brain to live with. She had a knack for deconstructing and observing life that was always going to mark her life. She had this rare mixture of natural empathy and understanding that destined her to never see old age.” Dr. Z shrugged a little and quickly asked me how I was feeling. She realized that she had been unprofessional by sharing all of that. I was fine changing the subject. I had this new back pain going on and I felt it get worse the more we talked about Sophia. So we changed the subject. We talked about something else. So we talked about back pain.