Waiting Room

She was a svelte girl of about twenty-two or –three, in a pale grey coat, knee–length, with a black, flowy bow clipped to the back of her head. There was a distinctly ethereal ethos about her, as if, just this morning, she’d stepped out of a painting to enter the world for the first time. In her lap she was hugging a Herschel backpack rather as though it were a certain white ermine. She was seated in the back of the waiting room, hip-pressed between the two narrow armrests of the linked chairs all along the back wall.

Her body was gurgling and her mind was numb and fluttery. Every morning there’s the same indefatigable mob of anxiety that savagely bayonets the fatigued belly of her consciousness. In her head Hannah was editing a PowerPoint of the monotonous events of the previous week, knowing full well the contents of the PowerPoint will become completely inaccessible to her the moment she’s in the direct presence of her therapist.

They’ve futilely dissected her social anxiety as if they were a class of first–graders dissecting a frog, and, last week, like a sentimental student who’s inappropriately grown attached to the frog, Hannah had stolen and tucked away her social anxiety in the deepest recess of her soul, rotting and perversely reeking inside her, hidden from her therapist whose yawns have become more frequent as the sessions have become more and more strained now that they have seemingly nothing left to dissect.