They said I’d understand once I was older, once I’d ‘grown up’. Well, it’s been a long time since then. I read faster, speak clearer, eat better, run further, and stand taller with my back straighter. I’m older now than I’ve ever been, and I understand perfectly well; they were full of crap.
Now, your instinct might be to lump me in with the likes of that angry kid from Pencey Prep, but I guarantee you we’re not all that alike. Don’t get me wrong, he’s right about a lot of things and if you ever talked to him, I don’t doubt he could convince you of the same things. Still, I don’t think it’d be arrogant of me to say that a little bit of pragmatism would’ve done him a lot of good. You probably know that too.
Anyways, this isn’t about him and it’s not about me either. It could be about you, but that’s not really up to me. Though, I can tell you a bit about some people I saw one day in a waiting room.
…
I don’t have the faintest clue about how I got here. I mean, I remember leaving home and taking the train, but I just don’t remember how I ended up here.
Lamps fill the room with warm white light, casting shadows as they hit the mass of furniture, magazines, knick-knacks, and thing-a-ma-bobs, but otherwise, it’s empty. The walls are carpeted with words that ask questions I could never imagine answering, at least, not properly, not out loud. There are only two doors. There’s the one I entered from which is a little bit strange. It’s an automatic glass sliding door, which I know isn’t that uncommon, but from the outside, it’s tinted. You can’t see into the room unless you press your face right up against the glass. That’s probably by design. There’s another door on the other side of the room which is the one I’m waiting to enter, the one we’re all waiting to enter.
Inside the room, it’s quite comfortable. On the left, as you enter, there is a neatly arranged set of chairs and on the other side where I’m sitting, there’s a set of lime green sofas which have been decorated with a couple of colourful couch cushions. The sofa sits quite low, so I can’t really see over the receptionist’s counter which is tucked into the corner. With her hiding somewhere behind that, it’s just me and a few others waiting in the room.
Opposite me, on the chairs, there’s Marc. He started coming here a few months ago. He’s really a lot of fun to talk to, he’s been telling stories since he was young and he’s always got a joke or two, but I suspect he’s not in the mood for conversation right now. I doubt he’s felt much like talking since the accident. What happened, it really wasn’t his fault. Everyone agrees, his friends, his family, even the car insurance company, but you try telling that to someone who just lost his brother.
What do you do? What do you say to yourself when something like that happens? How do you get away from that? He’s bound to the past by his conscience.
There’s a girl that he likes, that he loves actually. She loves him too, and he knows it. Maybe he’ll do something about it soon. Maybe not. I honestly wish I could tell you more about him. I wish I could tell you about what a good friend he is and how he takes care of his sister. I wish I could tell you about how he wants to be a writer and how he has the potential to be a great one. I wish I could tell you that he’s going to live a contented life filled with love, but I can’t. I truly have no idea how he will overcome history.
I just know he’s next.
The receptionist gets up from her desk and calls a name.
“Sam? … Oh, sorry. Marc?”
Marc looks over to her.
“Are you ready?” She asks.
He nods his head and places his palms on his thighs. For a second, he comes to a standstill, takes a breath, and walks over to the door we are all waiting to enter. It opens and he steps through.
The door closes and I lose sight of him. I turn my gaze back to the room. Behind where he’d been sitting is a girl. She goes by Deb. She isn’t old by any means, but she’s the oldest here. And she’s been waiting longer than any of us.
She doesn’t have a lot of stories the way Marc does. She also has never seen the inside of an aeroplane nor has she ever worn a skirt that didn’t cover her knees. She has never embraced love nor has she ever experienced its agony. She has never witnessed a snowflake waltz its way across a white winterscape. Her faith hasn’t kept up well with the times.
How much longer can you do everything you can to meet expectations which innately inhibit your freedom? How do you stop striving for the deliverance you have been promised your entire life and readily pursue liberty? From a life of certainty in simplistic obedience, there is no denying the terror of facing the wilderness found in freedom. The fences which once kept her spirit bound had also assured her safety.
Once again, the receptionist gets up from her desk and calls a name.
“Deborah?”
Raised on etiquette, Deb raises her hand.
“Are you ready?” asks the receptionist.
Without answering, Deb rises from her seat and heads over, stopping a metre before the door.
Her forehead creases and her eyes narrow. She momentarily glances around, turning her head to the receptionist, then to another guy in the corner, and finally, to me. Our eyes barely meet before her gaze returns to face the door. She enters and the door closes behind her.
Once again, the receptionist disappears behind her desk. Now, it’s just me and this other guy sitting on the corner couch, Aleks.
He’s just a kid really, only 20 years old. Though, I guess youth doesn’t make someone any less seasoned than the rest of us, especially with this kid. He’s brilliant. And he’s kind. His benevolence is so convincing of its inherence that it speaks to the deaf and illustrates to the blind. Though, what is perhaps the most impressive thing about him, is that when he speaks, people listen. In any room with any people, you’d be hard-pressed finding anyone who’s eyes and attention could manage to escape his gravity. If there were a drug you could take to have endless confidence and the ability to perfectly navigate through any situation like a virtuosic diplomat, your envy would wish to have him tested and see him banned for cheating. But no, that is who he is. Without flaw or folly.
So why? Why is he here? How could this Great Deus, be in this waiting room with me?
Well, who wants to be great? Who wants immeasurable power and wealth? Do you?
Oh, how wearisome it must be to have the lives of others hinge on every word you speak. And how it must ache to preside in a cloud of doubt, to carry guilt as though your ambition is in some way foul. How could Aleks ever know when to be satisfied, when the one who invested in his greatness is no longer around to see its remittance? He will never hear his father say the words,
“I’m proud of you, son.”
No matter what he achieves, how much land and wealth he acquires, at no time will he know,
“enough.”
From behind the desk, another name is called.
“Aleks?”
A moment passes without the light being distorted or the air being stirred. And you know that little grunt that people make when they get out of a seat they’ve been sitting in for a while? There wasn’t that either.
I look over at Aleks and his baby blues have stalled. They just sit there in his eye sockets like some car that’s out of fuel, lifeless.
As the moment passes, the receptionist shuffles out from behind her desk and calls again, this time quite loudly.
“Aleks!”
His eyes return to his body and slowly, he places his hands down and pushes himself off the couch. He begins walking and his path takes him toward a door, but not the door we’d been waiting for. He stands at the glass sliding door, waving his arms for the sensor to see, but the doors stay the way they are. For a while, he keeps his fists up, as though he could in some way fight the room, but as he persists, it becomes clearer that there was no contest to begin with. Tasting defeat, Aleks’ head lowers and he turns before crossing to the other side of the room and walking through the only door that will open for him.
If you’ve been following which I’m sure you have, then you know that means I’m now the only one left waiting. You might think that means it's time to tell you about why I’m here, but as I said earlier, I have no fucking clue. I don’t know what I’m doing here.
Though, I can tell you when I started coming here. It was towards the end of last year, around the time I was finishing up at college. I don’t know what you’d expect from me, but let me tell you, I wasn’t a bad student. In fact, I was exceptional. I was the crack-a-jack, jim-dandy, and the bee’s knees of students all rolled into one, though, it’s true my marks didn’t necessarily always reflect that. But I mean, sure, there are times where I could have actually attended all of my classes or engaged in all the irrelevant syllabus-mandated crap, but when it comes to making use of this 12-pound nugget on my shoulders, the other kids ain’t got shit on me.
It hasn’t been long since the receptionist last called for Aleks, but she soon calls for me.
Just as she’s done with everyone else, she asks me,
“Are you ready?”
“How do you tell?” I ask.
She stops in her tracks as my question fully captures her attention. Clouds draw across her eyes, and her brows narrow. I don’t think she expected that.
“Sorry, I-I don’t…” she mutters.
There’s a pause, which lasts for what must have been only a few seconds, but you could just as well convince me that we’d been enduring this drought of dialogue for decades.
“It’s your turn,” she says, finally.
But it doesn’t matter that she’s right. I already knew it was my turn before she said it.
“But, what if I’m not ready?”
“You’ve come all this way.”
God, that’s not what I asked. Can’t she respond to me like I’m actually a person? My nostrils flare as I take a deep inhale, funneling all my energy into my chest. What a waste.
There was a time I would scream and spit and cry and let it all out, but now the thought disappears into the crowd in my head. I could always see the anger, but now, the lens captures the dismay I would cause and the barren poignancy that would later engulf me. All that remains are the good thoughts. Kindness, compassion, decency. It is inconvenient, but perhaps, it is the lot I have drawn. Perhaps, this is all there is.
Little by little, my rational side regains control. The muscles in my body which had tensed up without my realising, let go along with my mind. And then with a single purging exhale, I extinguish the fire that had been growing inside me.
“Okay.”
I rise from my seat and I leave the waiting room.
Unlike the waiting room, this other room isn’t colourful. There are no comfortable couches and there are no shadows. Just a set of fluorescent ceiling rectangles casting down a veil of cold white light over a couple of chairs and the lady who stands in front of me.
This lady, I’m usually glad to see her. Much gladder than I was to see the man who was here before her.
There are times when she refers to events that I am too young to remember and she sometimes uses sayings that neither I nor any of my friends use, but she is still a long while away from growing greys or Caribbean cruises. Each time I’ve seen her, there’s an aroma of sweetened vanilla as though someone had just taken a batch of blondies out of the oven and left them to rest. Maybe it’s her, maybe it’s just the room. She often asks me questions, like the ones that covered the walls of the other room, but the way she asks them is different. She takes pauses when they are necessary, and she places emphasis on certain words. And when I answer her, her eyes are fixed on me, she nods, and sometimes, she’ll repeat parts of what I’ve said back to me. I do not fight for her attention nor do I really vie for it, and yet it is always mine.
With a warm, almost soothing tone in her voice, she says,
“Hi. Nice to see you.”
She lowers her head and gestures towards a chair with the palm of her hand facing upwards.
“Hi. Nice to see you too.” I say as I take my seat.
And as I speak, her eyes stay fixed on me. She nods and gives a delicately constructed smile. I don’t think it's manipulative or designed in its construction, but she simply must have practiced this smile with dozens of patients on numerous occasions. Sometimes a smile can be too neat which gives away its lack of sincerity, but that isn’t the case here. The problem with her smile is that it's too perfectly… imperfect, as though its authenticity could be a real signal that she truly cares about every single person that enters this room and sits in the chair I’m in right now.
After gifting me her pleasant smile, she proceeds to ask me a series of questions. I don’t like answering these questions. They’re always the same questions and they only ever let me answer them with the same responses, ‘not at all’, ‘sometimes’, ‘most of the time’, and ‘all the time’. As if I could ever accurately describe it with those phrases. If only it were that simple.
“Now with those out of the way, tell me how you’ve been.”
Greeeaaaaaat. I’ve been great! I’m unemployed, I’m alone, I haven’t eaten and I’m tired all the time. And even if I could get some rest, it’s not a ‘good night’s sleep’ kind of tired. It’s a different kind of tired, like wearing an uncomfortably tight jacket filled with glass beads over my bones. It’s the kind of tired where you’re gradually sliding down your seat, and you can feel yourself getting closer and closer to the edge and you’re about to fall off, but you still can’t pull yourself up. It’s the kind of tired that you could equate to chaos, where you’d just like someone to take your soul out of the pit that it’s fallen into and take it to wherever it is souls go to be at peace, just for a while. And despite all this, despite what you know and what everyone can see, no one has told that voice in your head. Nobody has grabbed it by the collar and intimidatingly stared it down and said, “Stop. You need… to stop.”
“I’ve been fine.”
“That’s good to hear. Did you write down what I asked you to last time?”
Like I could disappoint you too. Yes, I did the homework.
“Yeah, I did.”
“Great! So, what five values did you choose from that list?”
Last time, she’d asked me to pick from a list of 80 or so ‘values’ that were important to me.
“Well, I actually picked more than 5 because I couldn’t really narrow it down,” I say.
“Oh, that’s okay. How many did you pick?” she asks.
“23.”
Just for a second, her face changes the same way the receptionist’s had just a little while ago. Then remembering her role, she gives me another smile.
“I see. Would you like to tell me about why chose each one of those?” she asks.
She does a good job of controlling herself from looking at the clock. I could really fill out the whole hour with this if I wanted to, and she knows that, but still, she just keeps smiling.
“Okay. Well, first is Acceptance, which I take to mean both the acceptance of everything as it is, but also as the acceptance of other people and their beliefs.”
She holds her smile the entire time I’m talking, nodding intermittently.
“I agre-”
“I think firstly, acceptance of others is important because we need other people and because pluralism is imperative to our society. Acceptance makes people listen, it makes speech freer, streets safer, and hearts warmer. It elevates discussion and denounces bickering, but most of all, it stops fighting.”
“You make a good po-”
“Things can get bad. The economy can be down, living standards can be deplorable, healthcare can be depressing, but there’s no way any of that could compare to the devastation that comes with conflict. That is why we need to be able to accept things the way they are.”
“This seems like it’s a really impor-”
“Next is Accuracy which I wasn’t sure about at first, but then I thought about it as meaning staying true to yourself…”
I go on for a while and once again, she just keeps on smiling.
After Accuracy, I do Adventure, then Fun, then Growth, Genuineness, Honesty, and I kept going down the list. Every single time she responds the same way. She uses different words, but she always says the same thing and smiles the same way. I don’t know what I want, but at this point, I just want something different.
About halfway through the list, I reach Love.
“Well, Love is love, ya know?”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Do you want to expand on that?” she asks.
“No, I’m good. Next is mindful-”
“Hold on a second,” she interjects. “You’ve had quite a lot to say about each value so far. Are you sure there’s nothing else you’d like to say about Love?”
There it is again, that smile… that fucking smile.
“I can’t do this,” I mutter.
“Sorry?” she asks with her face is still smiling.
“I’m done.”
“What do you mean?”
I just can’t figure out how to say it and it makes me boil as hot as lava. My heart burns red and my mind turns black.
“I can’t FUCKING do this anymore.”
I get out of my seat and head straight out the door back into the waiting room and begin making my way to the next door, to get out there. The receptionist is already standing in front of the door, blocking my path. I stop and the doctor catches up to me and stands behind me. I turn back around to face her.
“Wait! You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” she says.
Talk about WHAT?
“Talk about WHAT? Talk about how I am completely unsure of everything and everyone around me? That the mass of lies that I’ve been exposed to since I was an infant has irrevocably shattered my ability to love or trust anyone? That I have no idea what I’m doing with my life? That I am so unable to trust even my own feelings and judgement that if by some miracle I did turn out to be truly happy in a career or in a relationship, I would not be able to tell?”
Her smile is gone now. Now comes that other face. Her upper lip disappears as her lower lip and chin come up. Her eyebrows rise and her forehead creases.
Pity.
There’s a specific moment that you experience just before you cry. Sometimes it builds slowly, and you can feel it coming, but it often sneaks up on you too. One moment, you’re deeply invested in a conversation, in a movie, in a song, or in a thought, and then an instant later, you find yourself overcome with this heat and tension throughout your body. You feel it in your chest, and you feel it in your cheeks. And then… you let it happen. You take a deep breath in, and then, as you exhale, you feel the pain and the tension both in your mind and in your body fall away. Your eyes begin to produce tears and for a second, you try to stop them. You try to hold it in, but by this point, it’s already too late. You’re a single person standing on a beach trying to fight the ocean. You try to close your eyes as if shutting down the beach could stop a tidal wave. The wave is coming and it’s going to crash onto the shore and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. So, you give in and hope that the wave carries you somewhere else, somewhere safe.
The first tears escape from my eye sockets and run down my cheek. As the wave hits me, it takes away my legs, and I fall to my knees.
“I-I just can’t. I’m sorry… I can’t.”
The receptionist hurries to her desk to grab a box of tissues and the doctor joins me on the floor.
“It’s okay, dear. Don’t say anything. You’ve said more than enough.”
For a minute, no one says anything. There’s just the sound of me sobbing, tearing a tissue from its box, and blowing my nose. Then she speaks again.
“Do you remember telling me about those people?”
“Which people?”
“You know the ones I’m talking about. Mark Twain, the prophetess Deborah, and Alexander the Great?
“Oh, yeah?”
“Do you want to know how to become like them?”
“How?”
“Don’t do anything. You’re already brilliant.”
