Live to Tell
Heather walked into her psychiatrist’s office and looked around as she did at the beginning of every session. It was only in Dr. Angel’s office that she followed the same routine every week.
Her eyes always landed on the Candy Land game that lived on the corner shelf. Of all the board games on display, it was the one that always stole her attention first. Heather chalked it up to the fact that she often immersed in the land of candy and fairies as a child.
At the sight of the familiar beige couch, a small sigh escaped her lips. It was her safe place. She sat on the sofa, picked up the leather pillow and hugged it tightly to her chest. Throughout the next fifty minutes, the cool cushion would give her something to grab onto if discussions got intense.
Heather assumed her doctor appreciated her new habit more than her old one. Before the pillow squeezing, she would tear his Kleenex to shreds and leave the messy remnants all over his floor. Heather spent the first few years staring ahead during difficult conversations, unfazed as hundreds of tiny pieces were left scattered at her feet.
She often worried about how crazy she appeared to him. Though she knew intellectually that the two of them were the only ones in the room, she still suffered anxiety that others might be listening to her biggest secrets. Visions of men in white coats rushing in after she finally voiced some devastating revelation sometimes kept her quieter than she wanted to be. Heather feared, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she’d wake up to an afternoon of basket weaving at the local crisis center. Her fears were part of the reason she so often held back when she really wanted to let it out.
Her doctor had long legs that ended in the shiniest shoes she’d ever seen. He stood about six feet tall and Heather viewed their height difference as four added inches of protection within their little unit. Try as he did to keep his dark, tousled hair on top of his head, it always fell onto his forehead during sessions. Heather thought it was cute and that it only added to his already massive character.
His shoes were sometimes black and sometimes brown but they were always so well cared for. They often became her focus when she found it difficult to make eye contact. Dr. Angel wore a dress shirt under his vest, exposing only the sleeves and the collar. Heather imagined his closet was in perfect order. His entire presence was both tidy and gentle and his thin build gave him an added touch of gentility. Her doctor’s prominent nose gave away his Jewish heritage.
Heather loved him for the role he played in her life. She thought of her psychiatrist as the most powerful person she had ever known because of the information and knowledge she had shared with him. In some ways, she felt as though he knew her better than she knew herself. In worse ways, she felt as though their ten years together still had never revealed who she truly was. He rarely got to see her everyday humor or view her professionalism or witness the mother she was to her boys and she wanted him to know the things he still didn’t see.
Heather sat back against the couch and reached her arm out to the table at her right. There sat the perpetual box full of Kleenex that she often assaulted during sessions. She never knew when their discussions would turn emotional and she figured it was better to have Kleenex in hand and not need it than have it the other way around. The last thing she needed was for her session to be interrupted by a sudden rush of snot and tears running down her face and nothing to wipe them away with.
After a decade of visits to Dr. Angel, the two were still attempting to recover Heather’s lost memories. It had been a long and tedious process where she had to learn to stop focusing solely on what she couldn’t remember and place the focus on the things that she did recall. They were also attempting to repair the important developmental stages she had managed to skip. Wise beyond her years in some ways, Heather was no more advanced than a two year old in other ways.
Her memories only came to her in bits and pieces. Like a movie with no real order and missing entire scenes, recollection wasn’t an easy task. Faces were unclear and details were muddied. The only things that remained clear were the feelings attached to the memories. It was all she had to prove that, however convoluted, the memories were still real.
Heather had located Dr. Angel, the only psychotherapist left in her city, through her health insurance manual. After years wasted visiting different psychiatrists, Heather had begun amusing herself with their stupid questions and their gullibility.
After a couple of years with