Was I supposed to be having those whatever-hallucinations he called them while I was sitting in front of him? I thought a therapist’s office was supposed to make everything better. That’s how my mom made it seem, anyway. If I’d just dealt with it by myself like I had intended to, everything would’ve been fine. Maybe. Probably.
Or maybe not.
“Crescent?”
Ah, fuck. I’d been staring at the wall behind him ratherthan at him. I was supposed to start nodding randomly in hopes it made sense with what he was saying. There was a big, black hole in the wall, just to the left of his head, and it was opening. Wider and wider, until I could see stuff inside it. Most of it was black, but sometimes a spider or some kind of bug would crawl out. I couldn’t tell what kind of bugs they were, or even how many legs they had, but I knew they were big. Dark ones. Scary ones. Some even going as far as to slither along the wall, taunting me by going behind his head.
“Crescent. What do you see?”
Damn it. I did it again.“Huh? Uh, I don’t know.”
Lee’s head tilted to the left, covering a part of my view of the hole. “I’m serious. If you feel safe sharing, I’d like to know what you’re seeing right now. Whatever it is, I’m not here to judge you.”
I looked at him, making eye contact from the couch of shame for the first time. “A hole. A big, black hole, and stuff is coming out of it.”
“Where at?”
“Behind you, on your left. On the wall.”
He nodded slowly, never looking away from me. “So that’s why you’re looking over there?”
“Well, yeah. Wouldn’t you?” I looked toward the corner, where a shadow had just run past me. “I mean, it’s all so distracting, you know? I can’t focus on anything in front of me when there’s so much happening everywhere else.”
“That makes sense. I’d find it very challenging to focus like that. Do you remember when you first started to see or hear things that nobody else could?”
I shrugged. “Well, I got sad first. Like, really sad. Depressed, I guess? When I was a teenager. That’s how it started, anyway.” Sighing, I shifted on the couch, picking my legs up and letting them fall back down. Could shameweigh you down to the ground? Was that what was happening?”
“Can you talk about what triggered the depression?”
Eyes with a forest of mossy green and wilted brown leaves materialized in my mind. The pupil right in the center of them came into focus, almost tearing me apart inside. I didn’t want to break down on Lee’s couch. Not after weeks of him handling me in crisis. This was the first time I was actually able to be coherent with him.
Thinking of Elio always crushed me. Every time he came into my mind, I’d find something new to be destroyed about. I’d think of a conversation in a different way than before or think about a bruise I’d noticed but didn’t think much of at the time.
This time, I felt it in my heart more than usual. “There was this boy I knew. His name was Elio, and we were best friends. Elementary through high school, we were inseparable. He even lived with us because of his shitty parents. He was everything I knew, and everything I didn’t know I couldn’t live without. One day, he asked this other guy out. Shit changed, then. Slowly but surely, until one day, he just… left.” My tear ducts started to sting with unshed tears, threatening to spill over. I couldn’t make my voice work, no matter how hard I tried.
We sat in silence. Me, on the couch of shame. Lee, watching me become one with the cushions. The black hole behind his head, growing larger and larger with every second that passed.
Lee cleared his throat. “He left?”
“He left the house, he left my life, but he never left my goddamn heart. Elio wouldn’t be a boy anymore; he’d be a man. A man I never got to see grow up.” I sighed, shaking my head. “It broke me when he left. I never got an answer on why. I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will, but I misshim every day. Every fucking day. And if I ever meet him again, I’m not letting go.”
I had to hand it to the man; he never took any notes. He somehow had it all in his mind, locked in some sort of therapy vault. Maybe a file cabinet with each of his clients’ fucked-up thoughts locked away. “So, Elio was your best friend?”
“Elio wasn’t just my best friend. He wasmore.He was everything.”
He nodded, as if he could understand. “So the depression started after Elio left, and then the depression turned into something more, right?”
“Yeah. Suddenly, I was hearing shit. Seeing shit. I thought I was losing my fucking mind. I started wearing the earbuds to make it all stop, but it didn’t work all the time. It came and went, and so did the depression, but I never stopped thinking about him. I never stopped wondering what happened.”
“That was the trigger for it all, it sounds like.”
“Yeah, I guess so. My sanity went with him.”
Lee crossed one of his legs over the other and looked at me. Just looked at me. Long, hard, deep in thought—he studied my face and my eyes, tracking each movement of them. “And you just dealt with this, for all this time, without telling anyone?”
The couch of shame enveloped me further, my back inching down until the back of my head hit the top of it. “What else was I supposed to do? Admit that I was crazy?”
“Having major depressive disorder with psychotic features doesnotmean you’re anything but in need of support, Crescent. I don’t like that word. You know this.”
