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I’m an Abyss in Motion

Bing Liu

    The psychiatrist has me sit on a day-bed. It has a hard leather material with a slight softness near the middle, where countless other patients must have lain. The psychiatrist has a peppery mustache and a pair of thin-framed glasses. He has a brooding serious face that he wears when he asks me to tell him the problem.
    “I want to tell a lie, any lie, that can give me a reason for me to believe my friendships mean something,” I say. “Perhaps I should explain. I was at the park in the middle of the night, swinging on a swing set, all drunk with an old friend of mine. I lied repeatedly about stories that I’ve experienced and lives I’ve lived and experiences I had. I told of my trip to South Africa with my father who was on a business trip. I said we had giraffe rides and ate with our hands in little huts next to unblinking natives. I used such moving detail and descriptive story-telling that it was believable even to myself. I began to have fun with it, making it a game that made me feel like I was playing a joke on him.”
    The psychiatrist nods while I talk, listening with a pen in his mouth. At times he seems as if he is about to say something. He takes the pen out of his mouth, juts his neck forward an inch, and noiselessly mouths some syllable before putting the pen back into his mouth.
    “And it’s hard to believe what’s real sometimes, when you can convince yourself of these things. And it doesn’t help that I read so much, that I read other stories that could just as well be true as anything that I hear in the news or from anecdotes I hear from friends. I can’t sleep sometimes because of it.”
    I take my hands out of my pockets, and fidget with them, rubbing my face, grabbing at the clumps of hair hanging over my ears.
    The psychiatrist looks at my hands and I see him suppress a yawn, water leaking out of his eyes. What a boring job he must have, listening to chumps like me.
    He doesn’t help, he just gives me a slip of paper with a certain amount of milligrams of a certain kind of multisyllable drug written on it. And I walk in the robotic automatic doors of the all-night pharmacy stores late at night, past aisles of seasonal Thanksgiving trinkets, past solid-colored cotton shirts on sale three for ten dollars, past shelves of candy bars, past cosmetic oval mirrors that make your face elongate for a second when you walk past them. I walk all the way to the back where mothers and children and old men wait in chairs in a corner section with industrial strength blue carpet covering the floor. I go up to a counter where young pharmacists in flowing white lab coats fetch me the multisyllabled drugs written on my now crumpled slip of paper. They check to see if my address and phone number are still the same before I leave. They aren’t, but I don’t care, I move around too much anyway.
    I swallow the pills and they numb me out for a while, or make me focus focus focus focus focus on one task, one task, one task, a project to get things done, get things done, get things done, done, things, getting done, get.
    And then the focus fades, fizzling out into my blurry mind again.
    “I often say things to others,” I tell the psychiatrist, “I always find myself repeating these little pithy sayings.”
    The psychiatrist pushes his glasses up with a finger and blinks at me.
    “Like when my friends are feeling blue,” I continue, “I’ll tell them something like, ‘Life is too short for that shit.’ Or I’ll tell them that living a nonreligious life requires a constant battle with meaning. I think I do it as much for myself as for others, though...maybe even more so for myself. Oh, how it’s so hard for me to handle changing beliefs bought on by this growing up thing. I feel like it’s not helping at all, how I reassess. I empathize with others. But I empathize with myself, too, do you know what I mean?”
    He nods. “I’m afraid our session is up,” he says, uncrossing his legs and getting himself up from his chair. He takes a pad of paper from his desk and comes back, scribbling something on there. “I’m writing you a new prescription. I believe you’re suffering from something far more serious than what I’ve originally assessed you as having.”
    I hear the rip of the paper as he tears it off his prescription pad and simultaneously feel the rip of my money from my wallet and feel the rip of my time from my life and the rip of my existence off this psychiatrist’s conscience. I try to make eye contact with the next patient in the waiting room as I leave, but she doesn’t let her nervous gaze leave the floor.

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