Tell Me,

She had a big face and a poodle haircut, and a bright sparkley shirt that might have seen a bedazzler in its lifetime. She was asking him point-blank questions and he wasn't saying anything, and the silence made me strangely harried. Why am I even here. Everything. When I first walked through the doors he was standing there, and the look in his eyes made me feel fearful and repulsed at exactly the same time. And then shortly after, shameful.

So she said finally to both of us, "what needs to be worked on?" and my mind flashed to laying on the forest floor at Priest Point Park, seeing Anne's car pull up in Lakewood, the photo shoot in Coshocton when he walked around with that face like a corpse, here we go here we go. Words. What are the words?

And I just wanted it over with. It made me angry that she came into the room with a box full of kleenex. That she said I had pain embedded in my face. How do you go back? You don't. I told him, I have hardened my heart. It is a survival mechanism. You don't tell someone that you tried to kill yourself after you were unsuccessful and then expect them to not self-preserve. And he kept looking at me with hopeful eyes because I kept talking and she kept saying that I wouldn't have been there unless I cared, and I thought, some of us are sheepdogs. And I thought of Anne and I smiled. I do care. But my life isn't forfeit anymore.

I am too close to my own thoughts to see them in perspective! Shut them out. That's what you do, it's how you survive. It might be harsh but some of us, she said, have to be sheepdogs. You fake the strength til you really have it. And it's either that easy or it's not.