Same Time Next Week
By. Hannah Kniat
She stared at the ceiling as her therapist looked at her expectantly. What was she supposed to say? Every week she sat in the same chair, in the same corner of the room, alternating between chewing the skin on her thumb and probing the cavity in her molar with her tongue. Every week, without fail, her therapist would ask her the same questions, and again without fail, Emilia would sit there and avoid taking any actual steps towards a resolution. Not that she didn't want to get better, but the fear she had when she approached those memories, those feelings, was just too much. She preferred the isolation of separating herself from that which made her human.
The therapist sighed. This wouldn't be the last time today she had a patient avoid the process, but it was probably the most frustrating case she had. Other people came to her and sought to shift blame, or avoid addictions, but Emilia was only here because of trauma that others had caused her. Between the ways she was raised, and the people she had been involved with in her teen and early adult years, there wasn't a happy story in the whole bunch. If only the therapist could reach her, but Emilia would sit in that chair and remove herself from the thoughts, the actions, the exercises, anything that the therapist would try. It was as if Emilia was on another planet.
She had started coming to therapy out of choice, the near-constant depression and anxiety that followed her everywhere was getting to be too much to carry on her own, but now she just wanted to leave. Her fingers, nails covered in cracked black polish, played across the ragged edge of her hoodie sleeve and she resisted the urge to check the time, a habit that she had fought to break when she first started coming to these appointments. The white noise machine sat in the corner, filling the room with static, and Emilia was glad for the sound rather than actual silence. Like a conductor, she kept time with the hiss in her head, marking a beginning and end to the cycle, and shifted a bit in her seat.
She was supposed to want to get better, and she did, but at the same time, she wasn't ready to do what getting better would require. She wasn't ready to let go of all the fear and hatred and anger that she had grown up with. It didn't help that it wasn't even really behind her, since she had needed to move back in with her parents. Her mom had not been shy about what she thought about her crazy daughter, and let Emilia know in no uncertain terms that she was a burden. Emilia hadn't told the therapist about this yet. She hadn't mentioned the fact that she had lay in bed for two days and 3 nights after that conversation. They hadn't discussed that her mother had looked her in the eye and told her she resented being Emilia's mom, or that it was obvious that Emilia had no pride, because if she did then she wouldn't be disabled. Emilia couldn't tell her therapist, and whenever she even thought about it her insides would turn cold and she would have to fight the urge to vomit. She couldn't admit that her mother resented her existence.
The clock was ticking, and she still hadn't managed to be forward about any of the million things that lurked beneath the surface, lingering just behind the veil. One thing these appointments did was bring back memories that played like movies in the back of her head. Her mother slapping her in the face, her mother red faced with rage threatening to drive the car off the side of the road and kill them both, her mother telling her that staying with a man who hurts her is the right thing to do. How could she move forward when all of these wounds sat inside her bleeding and oozing, but never healing? Emilia knew that part of the reason to come to therapy was so that the therapist could help those gashes finally stop bleeding, but she wasn't ready, and though she knew it was stupid, she couldn't let the pain go. She had never known a life without wounds of her mothers making, and she wasn't sure who she would be without them.
The therapist tried again, reaching out, to make contact with Emilia. She wasn't a bad therapist, a little green maybe, but she asked the right questions, if only she had the right client. Emilia had made the appointment, wasn't that enough? What did this well dressed lady with her eight thousand kids and happy marriage know about the pain of being completely unwanted. Her mother hadn't wanted a child, she had wanted unwavering adoration, and she had thought that Emilia was the key to making that happen. Little did her mother know, small children have needs, and those needs have to come first. According to her mother, Emilia's needs had come first so often that her mother had lost herself in them, but Emilia knew the truth. She knew that her mother had no true sense of self, and that the lostness that she may have felt while trying to parent was just her not knowing why she was failing so terribly to make this small person into a miniature version of herself.
With the sound of the therapists cellphone alarm the appointment was over, and Emilia rose from the chair smiling, thanking the therapist for her time. She would walk out through the waiting room, still smiling, until she got to her car where the wracking sobs would hit her, and she would think between tearful gasps that there has to be an easier way than this. She would put her head on her steering wheel and try to regulate her breathing, and bottle the pain that washed over her in waves, smashing down inside her until she was able to breath in a steady rhythm and finally pull away from the unassuming building. She'd be back, same time next week.
H.E.Kniat is 29 years old, and lives on a cat farm in the Southeast. She uses her writing to help guide her through her cPTSD, and seeks to express truth through art.