He leaves me rattling: the difference between can’t and won’t. He asks me specifically, why not this, why not finish your dissertation? I volunteer the connection to my father, my propensity to abandon things I’ve started. He circles back again: can’t or won’t? He tells me of how he too didn’t finish his dissertation at first but found something that pushed him on, an approach, a field, but he finished and was outraged when he was questioned during his orals. He points out it might never be too late. And I find it difficult to wrap my mind around it, it’s been well over seven years, the field has changed. Besides I am this now, their lives depend on me being this now. He leaves me with can’t or won’t, sounds to me like you’re just bored.

Extraction requires excavation, a digging through the flesh to come up with bones. It’s a mess in there. The little one says, I want us to put up halloween decorations like a family. She asks, are we irreparable? My son struggles against my touch. My mother hounds me about my isolation. My father tries. And I am left feeling selfish and alone, gripping the steering wheel through one song after another, charging into the night, heaving and sobbing and barely able to see.

No one will tell me what I already don’t now: I’ve heard it all before, it’s run through my mind a million times. Every angle, every tangent, well worn and dull: I am an animal, I am wounded, I am broken, I do not know how to heal, I’ve never known how to be. Mr self destruct, mr incomplete, mr apathy, jigsaw and irregular, spend hours and nothing fits. I cannot cope, I cannot believe, and I need an end that no one can provide, there is no miracle drug, there is no right word, no password to crack this code, no peace that is real. It is all in the imagination, it’s all been laid out and explained and found lacking.

Truest alone happiest alone at peace alone scotch and ginger ale square in front of me all that I am all that I could be within that amber breath in the bubbles within the chill of the ice the warmth in the gullet as I swallow this is all that you were meant to be not poet not writer not philosopher not father not lover not husband not real-just a man lost in the glass in front of him, just the drink that barely keeps up with an unquenchable thirst

She cuddles up to me in the night, the first time in days and whispers, but I want more. My daughter asks me to keep her warm and I bundle her up, tuck the blanket beneath her feet, hold her tightly while my son all of one stumbles about the house, plops his head on my belly. He then goes bumbling off again. When does it end? When does sorrow and remorse give way to mercy and grace? When does despair finally, resolutely dissolve before faith?

Asking for permission, permission to breathe, permission to weep, permission to love, permission to beg, permission to forgive. Of all the crimes and sins, perhaps the most sacrilegious request of all: to forgive and to be forgiven. No solace, only long empty days and terrible nights. I find myself aching, bent over double but I will not kneel to him, I cannot forgive him, he is everything wrong with this life, just the simple fact that he still lives.

When will i ever be happy again? When will I ever be present? When will I feel something other than remorse, regret, sorrow and numbness? It is not stupidly enough a matter of changing scenery: things would only get worse without some sort of stability, some sort of structure. But I feel as if I am pretending and increasingly find it difficult to live with myself: I am hurting everyone, I am cold and broken. I do not want to die but I also do not want to continually put the people that love me in this predicament. The therapist had said to me just as I was leaving: it is a terrible thing to feel like you’re second rate; it most suck some of the pleasure out of your life if not all of it.
When will I be free of myself?

So walking into the room we get the formalities out of the way: insurance papers and disclaimers, hipaa acknowledgements and privacy statements. He’s old and patient, stereotype, textbook shrink. But I’m comforted by his age: he’s lived, he’s seen it all.
He asks me: have you had previous treatment, have been hospitalized? No, only for stitches. I wonder if he’s noticed the scars on my arm. I tell him about the in school therapist at john jay. He wonders aloud where’s he heard john jay from before.
I clarify: john jay college of criminal justice. He asks me if I wanted to go into law enforcement and I reply how I originally wanted to be a cop, then a federal law enforcement officer but how a professor changed my mind. I point out how I have a degree in forensic psychology. He follows up with if I was familiar with behavioral sciences and I was.
He then asks me if I had any questions and I’m a blank at first. I think of what I was supposed to ask from what i read online: what’s your approach? Do you ask a lot of questions or just let the patient do all the talking? He responds (correctly) that it depends on the person: one patient he has comes in, talks about his issues, arrives at a conclusion and leaves. “I am more of a spectator to his process.” Another comes in and she’s all over the place and he presses her.
Next question: under what conditions would you refuse to see a patient? He explains that there some areas that are not within his expertise. That addiction isn’t something he would take on. And sometimes during couples therapy he’s had patients put him in the middle and issues on confidentiality might arise and he would recommend another therapist for one of the partners. He also gave an instance where the man had an order of protection against the woman and she had an order of protection against the man and yet both went home to sleep in the same bed.
And during this time I can’t help but notice that instead of a coffee table, he’s got this nice looking leather office chair with wooden arms sitting atop of a plastic sheet right in the middle of the room. So I ask, what’s with the chair? Is it for you or the patient. And his response was, “Well, the chair doesn’t work and I ask people not to sit in it. That’s it.”